


A Life Worth

by Ariajack



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Family, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gen, Personal Growth, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), fathers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-28 15:51:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20781143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariajack/pseuds/Ariajack
Summary: Steve Rogers went back in time and retired, but there were some things that just had to change this time around, hopefully for the better. As for Tony Stark, he's got more choices to work with, but sometimes the future is unavoidable, especially if you don't know about it.





	1. Having

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a friend as a catharsis piece after Endgame. It ended up a LOT longer than expected, but ah, well, what can you do? It's already completed and I will finish uploading it over the next few days. Hope you enjoy it A.

**2010**  
Steve gets a phone call he is not supposed to. He is sitting at his kitchen table, a breakfast that he and Peggy made together on the table, a fire in the fireplace despite their perfectly good central heating, and the windows shut tight against the January chill. The plastic casing of the phone creaks alarmingly in his hand until he forces his grip to loosen. He warned people about this. He warned Obie about this.

  
It’s Pepper on the phone, because Steve and Peggy are on the list of people to call before things hit the news. Her voice is raw and strained. Steve wants to tell her that it will be alright, but 70 years ago and 13 years from now, she sounded the same way and nothing was alright. Instead, he thanks her, hangs up, and tells Peggy. Tony’s convoy was attacked in Afghanistan and he is missing.

  
Peggy holds his hand for a long time. She knows what this means. She knows how much he fears for Tony. He fears for everyone. Steve is always, constantly, aware of how fragile and precious every peaceful moment of their lives is and he treasures them as much as he is haunted by the future. He came back to her changed, utterly, from the man she lost. He had fought and fought until he couldn’t fight anymore and when he came back he stopped fighting, almost completely. Sometimes, in his worst moments, he wonders if she doesn’t miss him. The young man who didn’t get himself beaten down so far that he was finally willing to stop standing up. He has grown to almost hate the future, because now he has the knowledge, the responsibility, of trying to change it. And, more than anything else in the future, more than battles he knows how to fight, and events he knows how to avoid, Steve fears losing Tony.

  
“This isn’t your fault, you know. You warned Obadiah.”

  
“I didn’t warn Tony.” Steve resents the way he has been overruled so many times over the years from telling Tony about the future, but no one else can understand why he thinks telling Tony is a good idea. Tony is not what anyone with half a brain would call mature. None of them knows what Tony would do if told, and no one except Steve even wants to find out.

  
Steve accepted years ago that Tony might never know. That for Tony Stark, maturity and grief had always and would always come hand in hand, and in shielding Tony he might be destroying the possibility of Iron Man ever existing. It hadn’t been that hard of a choice, really. Other choices had been harder and infinitely more suspect. At the time he had reconciled the compromise to himself easily enough. If Tony never became Iron Man, it didn’t matter if he never knew. Better for him to not know, in that case. And honestly, Steve could agree that dumping the legacy of Iron Man, the greatest defender of earth and a man who almost redefined an era both socially and scientifically, onto Tony, would be cruel. Steve knows how hard it is to be defined by the legacy of yourself. More than hard, it could be devastating. Yesterday he would have agreed, with some reservations, that telling Tony was probably a bad idea. That was yesterday.

  
“Steve. This still isn’t your fault, or if it is, it’s all our faults. We all made this decision together. You’re not alone in this.” He squeezes Peggy’s hand.

  
“Tony didn’t. He didn’t choose this.”

  
“Tony’s a grown man. He’s made a lot of choices over the years, most of them bad ones. If he starts making better ones from now on, I won’t complain.” Steve gives her a look. He has explained a thousand times how Tony can be both an irresponsible ass with the emotional maturity of a 5 year old and the greatest hero the world will perhaps ever know, and he knows that on some level they believe him. He also knows they can see Tony as he is and has been. He knows exactly how hard it is to try and trust someone whose responsibility flowchart consists of ‘Do I want to do it? Yes = Do it. No = Don’t do it.’ To make matters worse, Tony has both the money to ignore the consequences of his actions and the power to seriously damage people’s lives with his carelessness.

  
To Steve, none of this matters much, because whatever else Tony might be, cynical, a genius, irresponsible in ways only the insanely rich can be, selfish, egotistical, immature and frequently incredibly drunk at exactly the wrong times, he is also Iron Man, in some intrinsic way that cannot be separated from the core concept of Tony Stark. Steve sees that in him even now. He has always seen in Tony, the potential and promise of being a great man. He has always believed in it.

  
“You aren’t going to do something rash are you?” Peggy actually looks worried.

  
“No, nothing rash.”

  
“Tony will come out of this, Steve, and he doesn’t have to be Iron Man. You still have time to talk to him. Tell him the future when he comes back, let him decide then what he wants, if you think he’s ready.”

  
“I think it might already be too late. There are some things I just can’t change. Maybe Iron Man is one of them.”

  
“Then don’t try. And don’t hold yourself accountable for Tony’s choices. He’s not a child you have to protect anymore.” He tries to agree with her but the words stick in his throat. Instead, he gives her a grateful smile and kisses her cheek.

  
“I’m going uptown to talk to Obie. I’ll be back soon. Finish breakfast, and don’t forget your meds.” She makes a face at him.

  
“Yes, dear.” He takes a last sip of water and stands. She sighs as he leaves, though it might just be jealousy over how easily he moves despite his age. “Such a worrywart I married.”

  
Steve calls Bucky in the driveway as he gets into the car. Then, he goes uptown.

** 1946**  
Howard Stark was a genius, but Steve would be the first to admit that maybe he had grown a little too used to rubbing shoulders with the great and the good, because he could see Howard’s flaws more clearly now. Or maybe it was just 10 extra years of life experience and not being in the middle of a war. Those probably helped too. Howard in his memories of 10 years, a lifetime, or 6 months ago, depending on his perspective, was cocksure, charming, a fast talker, and generally knew what he was doing. The Howard of now seemed a lot more like his son and Steve was a little surprised he never made the connection. Strung out, nervy, and talking too fast in order to cover for the twitchiness, post-war Howard was Tony in the quiet times between disasters. It was déjà vu all over again except it was backward now because where he once saw Howard in Tony he now saw Tony in Howard.

  
“I’m gonna have a kid. A son. I have a son. Will have. God. This is crazy. You sound crazy, you realize that right?” They were at Howard’s place, Steve’s second stop in the future. He explained some of it to Peggy in the car on the drive up, but the rest he saved for Howard. It was hard not to feel like he was there to inform Howard of a death. He felt like the conversation should have started ‘we regret to inform you.’ But he wasn’t actually the bearer of bad news. The funeral he was at a month ago would never happen. Not here, at least.

  
“I know, But I’m not. It’s all true. Everything I’ve told you is the truth, or will be unless we change it.”

  
“Oh, you don’t have to sell me on that part. I’m a big fan of not getting murdered, believe me.” There was a short pause and a long pull from the bottle he has been clutching for the last hour or so. “What’s he like? My son.” It made Steve smile again. The wide eyed wonder might be partly the alcohol, but Steve knew a little about Howard’s childhood from odd comments slipped into casual conversation in a not quite blasé fashion. He could see how important the idea of Tony was to Howard.

  
Howard craved family. Steve wondered how he had never noticed before. He had always known Howard loved the future. It had just never occurred to him before now, that Howard loved the possibilities of his own personal future too. Steve had lost hope in a better tomorrow a long time ago.

  
“A chip off the old block.” He offered, still smiling and feeling the tears at the corner of his eyes. It was far too soon to be able to talk about Tony without them.

  
“Oh God, not that.” Howard looked properly terrified, but also just a little proud.

  
“He’s a good man. Gets a little lost now and again, but a good man. And he saves the world more times than either of us will ever manage.”

  
“Yeah. Wow. That’s really something else. Kinda puts us into perspective, doesn’t it?” Steve considered pointing out that Tony wasn’t going to be that man for a long time. That even when he was grown he was still going to be a long way from that man. Then he shut his mouth and smiled. The future was a long way off and the loss of Tony was too fresh to be speaking ill of him. He wished he could give Tony this moment, when Howard first felt unbridled pride in his son. Steve knew how much it would have meant. This was the wrong time, before or after when Tony needed it, but he was glad it existed. He would remember it for them. Someday, maybe, if Tony ended up not knowing how much his father loved him, Steve would give it forward: the gift of a father’s love.

  
He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Tony and Howard had clashed awfully the first time around, though Steve didn’t really know why. He hoped that it would be better this time. He didn’t like the idea of trying to play peacemaker between father and son, but a few words in Howard’s ear or gentle nudges to Tony might make a difference. He wanted the people he loved to have better lives. He wanted them to have the chances they hadn’t had the first time around. There were too many senseless tragedies that littered their futures. If he could just create the chance for a better option this time, then it would be enough. He didn’t want to ever stand on that lakeside again, much less watch half of everything turn to dust.

  
“We’re not going to let that happen again, are we? I mean, I’m proud as hell, don’t get me wrong. But I’ll pick up the damn thing myself if I need to. He shouldn’t have to... have to...” There was another of those pauses. Howard looked so worried, almost sick, like somehow Steve was the one who would decide the future, and he might choose to sacrifice Howard’s son for it. He felt a bitter gall rise in his throat at the thought of bargaining his friends for the greater good. He shook his head wordlessly. No, never that. Please, let him never become that man. “I bet he’s a great dad.”

  
“He is. He will be. He’ll be safe this time, Howard. I’ll make sure of it. We all will.”

  
“That’s good. That’s really good. Hey, what’s my granddaughter’s name again?”

  
“Morgan.”

  
“What, like the horse?” Steve couldn’t help it. He laughed until he cried. It was good to be back.

**2010**  
“You didn’t answer my calls.” Obadiah Stane’s New York office is dark with the blinds drawn and the light off, and Steve takes advantage of a little theatricality and waits at his desk for him to turn on the light. He’s not sure, but he might be stealing directly from Nick Fury’s playbook on manipulation and intimidation. Obie is clearly not expecting him. He looks tired and tense.

  
Theoretically, Stark Industries is now based primarily in California, but its roots are in New York, and Obie often stays here when Tony is out of town. It’s an opulent office, but an older style than Tony prefers. With lusher carpets and more intimidating chairs. Tony prefers practicality and comfort in his working spaces. He might not like offices much, but when he does use them he prefers large empty spaces he can freely fill with whatever random thing strikes his fancy. A true Tony office is all about Tony, and is always in some stage of becoming something else. Usually a workshop. This is Obie’s office, traditional and a little stuffy, but warmer and meant to hold company.

  
“I’m sorry about that. It’s been a… long day.”

  
“I know it’s been a long day. I remember warning you about this day. In fact, I remember multiple conversations about how to avoid today. And here we are. Having. A long. Day.” He’s definitely borrowing from Fury now, but he prefers inspirational friendliness to intimidation usually, and that just isn’t going to cut it right now. Obie pours himself a drink. Steve doesn’t like being angry at Obie, but they’ve been friends for decades. Obie is part of the sacred trust to protect the future and has been for years. That Tony is not safe right now, is Obie’s fault. Obie has taken the future into his own hands, has broken faith with them, and that is just about the only thing that can make Steve really angry anymore. Even he doesn’t casually do as he pleases without consulting the others. One person cannot decide the future. It’s too much to put on them.

  
“It’s about to get longer.” Obie heaves himself into the chair across from Steve and just looks defeated. His whole body is heavy with exhaustion. Steve realizes Obie’s hands are shaking badly around his drink. A feeling of dread settles into the pit of his stomach. Obie chokes on his next words. “We got confirmation an hour ago. A video from the bastards that took him. Tony’s…” Obie starts to sob, openly. His hand comes up to cover his face, but it doesn’t muffle him “Tony’s dead, Steve. They filmed his execution.” Obie gives up on saying more. The world weighs down on Steve. This is not supposed to happen. For a long time there is just the soft sound of Obie’s grief, and the sound of his own heart thumping in his ears.

He’s in a field of war outside of New York City.

He’s standing by a lakeside that has haunted his dreams so often he could draw every ripple with his eyes closed.

“It’s my fault. I told him not to go. I swear I did.” Obie’s hands are pressing into his head now. He is curling in on himself, gasping through his grief. Obie is already starting to self-destruct around Tony’s loss, but Steve can barely comprehend what is happening. After all this, after everything. To fail here and now, over something that wouldn’t have even failed if he left well enough alone… To lose Tony now, before anything had even happened. It’s the first time since he began this that he’s lost someone early. He hardly even thought to fear it happening. But now. Oh now. “But he’s, he was, so damned stubborn…. Someone brought up Howard living in a war zone for his work. And you know Tony, and Howard.”

  
Steve does not want to hear this. He doesn’t want to know any of this. He does not want this to exist here in the world he lives in. Not this. He thinks it over and over again. One of those useless mantras that happen when the unbearable must be borne, somehow. Not this, not this, not this, not this. “It’s my fault. I should have sat on him. I should have recalled the… the… jet and gone myself rather than let him go. It’s just... He looked just like the man you always said he would. I thought… maybe… he was ready to… to… oh God, I killed him. I killed him, I killed him.” Obie gives a wet, coughing heave, his drink sloshes and then falls on the floor, staining the carpet with the scent of alcohol. Steve swallows hard, opens his mouth, closes it again. Tries to think of something, anything to say. There is nothing to say to this. There is never anything to say to this. He knows he’s in shock. He’s too numb to comprehend this loss happening again. But time keeps crawling forward and he has to speak, eventually. He has to speak, and these words are awful. Words that are said now that Tony is dead. Words that exist in a world where Tony does not exist.

  
“It’s not. It’s not your fault, Obie. He should have survived this. If he didn’t. If he didn’t… Then it must have been something I changed.” Steve remembers, for no reason, the day Tony was born. He had been there. Had held that tiny warm bundle of person against his chest and felt the world shift around him, new meaning and context coloring the corners of his life. It wasn’t his child, could never be, but still. He had looked up at Peggy and seen it in her eyes too. He had seen gods and monsters and aliens, had witnessed death and madness on scales people could hardly dream of, but that common, common thing of a child being born… It was a mundane miracle the like of which he had never seen before. And now, the miracle is over.

  
He feels like an old man, who has lived too long. More than that, he feels like a murderer. There is no possible forgiveness for this. He knew the future, and changed it, and Tony paid the price of Steve’s arrogance. Looking up, he knows Obie feels it too, sees it in the curve of his spine. Hears it in the heaviness of the sobbing. He reaches out across the desk and puts his hand on Obie’s shoulder. Steve had been close to Tony, especially as a child, but Obie had worked with him daily as an adult. He was, in some ways, closer to Tony than Steve in recent years. Steve had never met Obie in the future. Tony had never even mentioned him, and so he has always assumed that their relationship must be deeper this time around, and also perhaps that Obie doesn’t have too much longer to live, because 2012 is just around the corner. He hopes, distantly, that this isn’t the death of the man. That the tragedy of losing Tony won’t be compounded by losing Obie.

  
Leaving is painful, but eventually he knows he must go. He must tell Peggy. This will break her heart. For all her annoyance with Tony’s life choices. She loves him deeply as well. As he shuffles back to his car, guilt starts to seep in around the heavy stone of grief and shock in his heart. It’s an old friend

  
The drive back to Brooklyn is too short. He doesn’t know how he’s going to tell the others.

** 1953**  
Generally speaking, Steve was pretty easygoing when it came to Howard’s crazy plans. But this particular bout of insanity was just not going to happen, and he was pretty sure that once Howard actually got more than 4 hours of sleep under his belt, he would understand why. A year long Stark Exposition was an excellent idea and Steve was sure it would succeed. If only because Howard wanted it to. But no matter what Howard said, Captain America would not make an appearance, and Steve would not stand in for himself as a ringer so that he could reprise the “Star Spangled Man With A Plan.”

  
He would think that Howard was not actually serious, because this was an incredibly bad idea even for a sleep deprived Stark to come up with, but Howard was being insistent to the point of pushy and it was getting ridiculous. He finally left him to Peggy, frustrated by how little Howard was listening, and availed himself of the quiet patio, a glass of lemonade provided by Jarvis, and the surprisingly good company of Howard’s other house guest. Obadiah Stane, there to help get the main planning of the Expo finished while Howard had the inspiration for it.

  
He’d met Obadiah, “Call me Obie” before, and thought he was a pretty good influence on Howard. Obie was definitely the more business savvy of the two, managing the paperwork side of all of Howard’s grand, and occasionally awful, ideas.

  
“Get tired of arguing with him?”

  
“Peggy’s better at it. More experience.”

  
“I don’t know how he came up with this crazy idea. I swear I didn’t give it to him. I mean you don’t even really look like Captain Rogers.”

  
“Thanks.” Said Steve. Obie was speaking purely out of kindness. The fiction that Steve Rogers had died in 1945 and that Peggy, who kept the last name Carter for work reasons, had subsequently married a tall, blue-eyed man named Steve Roberts was painfully thin in a lot of ways, and where it wasn’t thin it was insulting. Also, dying his hair dark brown every few weeks was annoying. Obie tried very hard to reassure Steve that he was not a replacement, was valuable in his own right, and always seemed confused as to why none of the principal characters in this little drama weren’t more concerned. He probably, Steve realized, thought that this whole plan was one more mortifying kick in the gut to Steve. They were going to have to tell Obie one of these days. He appreciated the kindness, but he was beginning to feel bad about all the secondhand embarrassment they were putting him through. He tried to pull off looking gracefully unconcerned by the whole idea. In truth, he could see the amusement factor to it. It was a pretty typical Howard joke. Expensive as hell, awkward for those in the know, incomprehensible to everyone else, and the kind of thing he could smirkingly bring up in conversation for the next 30 years or so. Maybe he shouldn’t be so surprised after all.

  
“How’s he doing, lately?”

  
“Howard? Oh, he’s fine, just fine. He’s just been busy, you know how he is.”

  
“He looks like he hasn’t been sleeping much.”

  
Obie shrugged. He didn’t look too worried. Which, Steve thought was probably a good sign. He wondered, a little guiltily, if this wasn’t a little his fault. He’d been busy this last year. The newly minted SHIELD was still in its infancy, and for the first few years had been primarily at work building footholds in the remains of Europe. Now they were starting to branch out a little, and with the receipt of actionable intelligence came, unsurprisingly, action. Steve was building STRIKE teams, or what would someday be called STRIKE teams. Right now they were Commando teams, of which the Howling Commandos were considered the Ur example. He didn’t lead them himself. He’d been retired from field work since 2023 and was not looking to change that, but his knowledge of strategy and his large repertoire of futuristic fighting techniques was coming in very handy. He spent a lot of time recreationally beating people up. It was for their own good. Also, it was certainly not because of some locker room talk about Ms. Carter. But with that and other things closer to home to keep track of, he hadn’t been out to see Howard in a while, and had hardly been able to do more than nod hello when he saw him at SHIELD. The times when he did do more were when Howard and Bucky had gotten themselves neck deep in Something and wanted him to explain matters to Phillips.

  
Phillips had had an utterly unexpected reaction in 1946. He had stared at Steve, eyed a beaming Peggy and a practically manic Howard, glanced through the completely fabricated résumé with his eyes lingering on the name Steve Roberts, and then, with a perfectly deadpan face said, ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on, and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear a thing about it, ever. You’re hired, now get out of my office.’ Howard had been in complete awe. He spoke of it ever after as the finest straight man moment in history.

  
Phillips and Steve now had a perfectly cordial working relationship where they both pretended they had never met before 1946 and that every impossible thing Steve knew or did was totally normal. Steve would have gladly told him everything and brought him into the fold, but Phillips flat out refused every possible lead in, sometimes vehemently. This tended to make him a little more circumspect about questioning Steve than he was with anyone else, and that in turn was why Howard, Bucky, and occasionally Peggy liked to use him as a go-between to expedite some red tape. If Phillips noticed what they were doing, he seemed content to let it slide as long as they didn’t break too much stuff.  
There weren’t any recent moments of being used as the middle-man though, so Steve wasn’t sure what exactly Howard had been up to recently. There had been that mess up in Kiev 6 months ago, but he was pretty sure everyone had recovered from that all right. Things were pretty stable, he thought. There shouldn’t be anything too drastic happening. Howard might just be creating extra drama out of boredom. Or what passed for boredom when a man who lived his life at breakneck speed found himself slowed to merely hurtling along.

  
“He’s been talking about leaving SHIELD recently.” said Obie, and it was so apropos of what Steve was just thinking that it took him a moment to parse the meaning. “He’s starting to feel disconnected from the work, whatever that is,” Obie was not among the initiated when it came to SHIELD either. “and with the company taking up more and more time….” Obie was beginning to look a little guilty. “I haven’t really known what to say to him about it all, and now he’s come up with this Expo plan, and that’ll take up even more.” Obie gave a giant helpless shrug in Steve’s direction. Which was fair, because this was really not Obie’s problem. Strictly speaking it wasn’t Steve’s either, but he had a long standing habit of making other people’s problems his problem.

  
“I’ll talk to him about it.”

  
“I don’t think he really wants to leave SHIELD.” Obie hesitated a little and looked uncomfortable. Then with the awkward air of someone unused to conspiracies trying to be conspiratorial said “He’s been drinking more, lately.” Steve managed not to sigh, barely.

  
Howard was not quite as self-destructive as Tony at his worst, but he was also not as stable as Steve had always thought he was or as history had made him out to be. He suspected it might just be because the internet hadn’t been invented yet. He really hoped that someday Howard learned how to rest. Properly rest. The white hot party spotlight he occasionally indulged in when the stress got too much didn’t count. Steve also hoped that age would mellow him, and that Maria would show up soon and prove herself to be every inch the woman her son loved so much. However, considering Tony wouldn’t be born for another 17 years, that didn’t seem likely. While he was hoping for impossible things, he also wished everyone would stop driving themselves crazy to the point of needing an intervention. It would be nice.

  
He made a little more small talk with Obie, who had a girl down in Newark (Steve only narrowly avoided making a reflexive comment on Jersey) and was a passionate Dodgers fan (He was going to be so disappointed in ‘57, but Steve wasn’t going to breathe a word). He liked Obie. Sometimes it was nice to talk to someone who was just enjoying their life instead of pushing it to the limit all the time. Then he took a fortifying sip of lemonade, and rejoined Howard and Peggy.

  
They stopped talking when he came in the room, and he suspected he might have become the topic of conversation while he was gone. Sometimes, most of the time really, his time travel status did not affect his life overmuch. Other times, it affected it a lot, and those times were usually when at least three of those in the know were in the same room together. This was starting to look like one of those times.

  
“Am I interrupting?” He asked lightly.

  
“Nah,” said Howard, in a way that meant probably yes. He really did look edgy. Steve wondered again what was going on his life and made a mental note to talk to Bucky about Kiev. He’d been distracted at the time with some personal business and now he thought that maybe had missed something important “Hey listen, what do you think of me maybe leaving SHIELD for a while? That gonna mess up anything in the future?” It was asked casually enough, but there was a mulish set to his face Steve knew well. In fact, Steve vividly remembered killer robots and doomsday scenarios because of the same look on a different Stark’s face. After many years of contemplation, Steve now thought of that look as more of a cry for help than anything. A stubborn Stark was often one who was close to desperation, father and son. Steve was grateful that his rapport with Howard was stronger than it had even been with Tony. Howard would suffer himself to be led if he thought Steve meant it honestly enough. Sincerity had usually just pissed Tony off more.

  
Still, Steve hated it when they tried to use him as an oracle. He really did. His answer was almost always that he didn’t know and that everything was different already. And then he ended up having to give an opinion anyway, because that was never good enough. He decided to skip that part, because it wasn’t the real problem here. He didn’t know exactly what the real problem was, but if something nastier than he knew had happened in Kiev or even if it hadn’t and this was some other worm turning in Howard’s life, the answer was obvious.

  
“I think it’s your decision.” He said, sitting and putting his lemonade on the table. Peggy looked positively betrayed. Howard looked it too, for a moment, before remembering he had just won the argument. “I don’t think the future is something that fragile. We’ve changed a lot of things, hopefully for the better. But now our bases are pretty much covered for a while. If you want to take a break from SHIELD and work on other projects that’s entirely up to you.” Peggy was moving from betrayal to outrage. She clearly felt he was undermining the war effort here, but she trusted him enough not jump in just yet. Howard looked caught between triumph, confusion, and maybe a little bit of hurt. This had never been Steve’s position before. Steve was big on unity and teamwork, but what so many people often forgot was that those values extended beyond professionalism. Steve wondered sometimes why people didn’t realize that he cared for them as friends as well as comrades in arms. He considered it a personal failing on his part, that so many saw him as someone who demanded sacrifice from them rather than wished the best for them. “Howard, there isn’t a plan for the future. There really isn’t. Whatever happens is on us, sure. But we can’t live in fear of that and we shouldn’t let it hold us back or let it plan our lives for us. SHIELD isn’t going anywhere and neither are we. If you need help, we’ll be there, but you aren’t chained down. Do what you need to make the future you want to see. I trust you to make whatever decisions you see fit. You’ve earned it.”

  
“Dammit, Steve.” Said Howard after a long moment of looking at the drink in his hand, all fight drained out of him, just dog tired. Then he looked up and there were actual tears in his eyes. Steve hadn’t been expecting that. Whatever was going on was bigger than he knew. He decided to call Bucky that night. Whether it was Kiev or something else, Bucky would probably know. “Why do you always have to say the right thing like that? Now I feel like a heel for bringing it up.” He brought his hand up to his face and scrubbed briefly at his eyes. Steve shared an alarmed glance with Peggy, who clearly also did not know what was going on. She visibly softened the almost militant posture she’d had since Howard had first started in on his Star Spangled Man plan.

  
“That’s your own fault for being dramatic,” she said, but her tone was one of forgiveness and reconciliation “I think Steve’s right, as usual. No one is going anywhere and you working on your own projects is hardly the end of the world. There will always be a place for you at SHIELD. I think we can guarantee that much.”

  
“Thanks. I just… need some time off. I need a break. Sometimes, working with SHIELD. It’s like it never ended, you know? We’re home now. Shouldn’t we be able to stop fighting? Isn’t there something that’s supposed to come after the war?” Steve’s breathing faltered a moment. He started to reach out and then stopped, looking helplessly at Peggy who was as surprised as he.

  
“Of course there is, Howard.” She said, a little too gently, taking his hand from where she sat, closer than Steve. “Haven’t you heard? The future is going to be grand. The only thing missing is the flying cars. Figure out those and we’ll none of us have a thing left to want in the world.”

  
“Flying cars, huh? I haven’t looked at my plans for those in… well, not since the ‘43 World’s Fair. It wasn’t very practical... for a world at war.” Steve came around to Peggy’s other side.

  
“Then, maybe it’s time to dust them off. Since we’re at peace. I always wanted a flying car. Thought it was a shame the future didn’t have any. It would be a good difference to have.”

  
“A future with flying cars.” said Howard, still oddly choked. “I guess, that would be a future I want to see after all.”


	2. Keeping

2010

The air is too dry, and the world won’t stop spinning. His head hurts like a plane got dropped on it. Except, _shit,_ it was a bomb, and now there’s a bag over his head. _Shit shit shit_. His mind blanks out in panic and he can’t put two thoughts together to save his life. He wants to throw up, but he also wants to scream and he decides to compromise by doing neither. His chest hurts. Actually, his chest hurts more than his head, which is saying something.

The bag coming off does not help, because there’s a camera and a bunch of not friendly looking people. Then the people behind him start talking, and he realizes he’s in one of Those videos. The ones with terrorists and guns, and some poor sap in the wrong place at the wrong time who never gets heard from again. He is immediately resentful of any situation where he seems like a poor anything. The sap part might be true. A gun cocks, and his blink turns into his eyes being closed and his breathing getting very tight. He really really really hopes this isn’t a video that includes a live execution. He doesn’t speak a word of… whatever language it is being spoken right now. Arabic? Pashto? Dari? He doesn’t speak any of them. Then the video ends, and the bag goes back over his head.

He’s still panicking much later. He feels he’s entitled to panic because there’s a car battery attached to his chest. Okay, not like THAT, but still. Also, he’s in a cave. And his interpreter/savior is not a hot blonde. So really, what is there to not panic about? Despite being disappointingly male, the little bald guy might just be his very newest best friend. He certainly seems invested in keeping them alive, which shows excellent prioritization. He’s also not a terrorist, so really, what else could you want in a new best friend? Well, right after Rhodey and Happy, who have seniority and all. Pepper doesn’t count cause she’s a girl. Admittedly, he knows nothing about arc reactors and is therefore not very helpful, but Tony is used to being the smart one in his friendships. He’s very democratic that way. On the other hand, the doc’s also the other smartest person around, and if he can’t tell what Tony’s doing then the terrorists don’t have a chance in hell. He hopes.

The feeling that gradually overrides his panic, is anger. The translator gives a hell of a speech. He approves. Nothing like turning panic and fear into some nice productive outrage. And it’s true. Those are his weapons. Someone is doing something dirty, and considering the number of boxes and missiles he saw, he probably knows that person. This isn’t some low level lackey skimming a couple of crates off the top of a shipment and selling them on the black market. This is corporate espionage. This is treason. This is the kind of thing they used to shoot people for and maybe still do. Someone is using his tech and his company to kill Americans. If he thinks about it too long, he won’t be able to think about anything else, so he doesn’t. He puts that ugly mess on the back burner, where it can seethe, seasoned by the comments everyone seems intent on making lately about the Stark ‘legacy’. His legacy. His father’s legacy. Whatever the hell that means. He’s not sure when everyone became such an expert on the social and historical ramifications of the Stark family. He’s certainly not as up on the subject as everyone else seems to be just now.

Instead, he focuses on doing something productive. Like, for instance, showing up dear old dad, and miniaturizing the arc reactor into something the size of his hand. Yinsen (Tony suddenly remembered that people had names and it’s polite to know them) is not as impressed as he ought to be. This is probably the biggest technological advancement of the modern age. He can revolutionize the energy market with this if he wants to. More importantly, it’s going to get them both out of here. As a bonus, it should also handily take care of his little legacy issue. That’s like, three birds with one take-that-dad stone.

Yinsen is more impressed by the mecha. Tony admits, it’s going to look damn impressive. He’s dealing with a big, fancy, highly armed, terrorist group after all. It would be a shame not to dress for the occasion. They want Stark weaponry, he’ll give it to them. The very best he has, made especially just for them. The vengeance high carries him for about a week, but the more he plans the escape, the more he realizes that there’s another problem. Yinsen doesn’t have a suit of armor or an arc reactor. He’s going to be a soft squishy person in the middle of a lot of bullets, fire and explosions. He’s desperately thinking it over as he pounds out metal and solders down the more delicate wiring in the long evenings. The armor is his design. It will do exactly what he wants it to do because he is Tony Stark and he’s making it. But he doesn’t know how to make sure that Yinsen will be as safe as he is. He can’t, he realizes. It’s actually impossible. He can only make sure the hallway is very clear and tell Yinsen to follow at a safe distance.

That’s not good enough. That’s not good enough at all because then if Yinsen dies… That’s on him. He’s Tony Stark. He should be able to assure the protection of one tiny doctor while doing what needs to be done. He can’t. He takes an extra three hours trying to figure if he can extend their metal supplies into a little extra armor for Yinsen. He can’t do that either. This must be what being poor feels like, he thinks. For the first time in his life. Tony Stark is suffering from a resource shortage. Time, supplies, and materials are slipping through his fingers at an astonishing rate and if being a genius doesn’t make up the shortage, the remainder will be paid in blood. Probably not his either. He thought before that he feared failure. He thought failure had his father’s face, disapproving. He was wrong. Failure is a dead man he owes a debt to.

About 3 months later, Tony’s finishing up the flamethrower, when he suddenly remembers something important. To be fair, this thought has been politely waiting for his acknowledgment for the last hour or so, but he was busy, and no matter what he says, he really is not that great a multi-tasker. It’s only when he stops for a drink of water that it hits him and completely derails the quiet creative hum in his head. This whole thing has to be killing Steve, Peggy, and Obie. And Rhodey, and Happy. And maybe, if he’s lucky, Pepper will be upset too. That’s a lot of people, actually. A lot of people who will be upset if he dies. Or maybe are already upset thinking he’s dead. And half of them are old, which is weird because if you had asked him Before, he would have blithely told you never to trust anyone over 50. It’s humbling. As completely unconcerned as he has been with the good opinion and approval of people in his life. He knows, without having to wonder, that he is missed. What a valuable thing, he never noticed he had. It must have been hiding underneath all the other shiny things in his life that just happen to be missing right now. He talks to Yinsen about it over backgammon. Yinsen has a family. Tony probably should have known about that, but like names, family sometimes goes over his head. Yesterday, he would have said he didn’t have one. For the first time in his life, Tony feels true camaraderie. He and Yinsen have the same treasure. They are missed. They have a home waiting for them.

“And you, Stark?”

“Yeah, actually I do have a family. Well, I mean, they’re not really related to me, but you know. It’s the thought that counts, or something like that, right?”

“So I have heard.”

“Actually, I was just think about what my Uncle Steve would say about all this.”

“Oh? And what would Uncle Steve say?”

“You know, I don’t actually know. Probably something inspiring and meaningful. He’s a real pain in the ass that way. But I think I might actually ask him when I get home.” They do not usually discuss going home. It feels like bad luck. “I almost never ask what people are thinking. It’s not really worth it. Bet he’ll be...

And then the door opens and neither of them have time for conversation, because the word deadline has never been so literal.

1970

Howard was hovering. He looked like every clichéd soon to be father ever, and Steve was trying really hard not to laugh at him. He was only sort of succeeding, but he doubted Howard had noticed.

“Howard, it’s going to be fine. Sit down. You’re wearing yourself out.” Howard managed to sit for all of 10 minutes while Steve did his best to distract him with a crossword puzzle. It was hilariously unsuccessful, because Howard either knew the answer off the top of his head and didn’t have to think about it (the atomic weight of boron was 10, apparently) or he had never heard of it and didn’t care (“Who the hell named their band the Monkees? That isn’t even spelled right.”). Even sending Howard to the payphone down the hall to call an eager Obie, stuck holding down the office fort, with updates wasn’t enough. For one thing, there weren’t enough updates. For another, Obie’s excitement and ecstatic predictions of happiness kept setting off Howard’s anxieties. Steve gave up completely when a nurse hurried out of the room on some errand and he had to save her from Howard’s ambush. He did what he promised he wouldn’t and gave Howard a drink. Howard had been mostly dry recently, Maria’s good influence, and Steve wouldn’t normally interfere in that, but this was turning into a long delivery and they weren’t allowed in the room, so, alcohol it was. Not a lot though, Peggy would murder them both if Howard turned up drunk later.

It did calm him down, which was what Steve was hoping, but whiskey with no party atmosphere tended to make Howard more contemplative, so they end up sitting in the hospital corridor talking about family, and the future, and by now, that well worn track was less about Steve’s version of it, and was more about what they hoped it would be.

Howard was very afraid he would be a terrible father. He honestly had no idea how to be one. His own father mostly provided an example of what not to do. Now, staring down the barrel of actually being a father himself, he was trying to figure out where the starting point was. Steve had no memories of his own father, who had died before he was born, and he’d had precious little contact with families since then. However, he did know Tony, and knew a little about his complicated feelings toward Howard.

“I just don’t know what to do. Sure, it sounds good. Just be a good role model and feed ‘em and... and... I don’t know, teach them some schmaltzy life lessons about sharing and being honest, and hey, presto! You’re a good dad. But what if I’m bad at it? I mean, I’m so busy all the time. And I don’t know anything about kids.” Howard was waving at the air expressively, which had less to do with the whiskey and more to do with the stress and tiredness catching up to him.

“I think it’s something you’ll just have to take day by day. Take some time off work, go play catch or build a potato gun together, or something. If you’re worried you’re not spending enough time with him, then go spend time with him.” Steve could have said something about how Howard worrying about it meant it would all turn out fine, but he had always thought that if worrying about something meant you could do it properly then the world would be a very different place.

“But what if he hates me? I hated my father. Hated him for years. Hell, I still kind of hate him.”

“I don’t think he’ll hate you.” said Steve. “He might think he does, but I don’t think he’ll ever really hate you.”

“God, I hope not. He’ll turn out all right in the end though, right? I mean it’ll be different this time around, but he’ll be okay? Even if… even if something happens to us, you and Peg will still be there for him, right?” Steve blinked at him, caught off guard a little. He hadn’t realized this was something Howard was worried about.

“Howard, nothing is going to happen to you. We fixed that.”

“Well, yeah, we stopped it from happening that way, but what if they send someone else? Or, if we managed to stop Hydra from ever coming back, maybe it’ll be some other group. The Russians, or the Chinese... or... or… who knows who else?” Howard shrugged. “Keeping me from dying the one way, just means we don’t know when I’ll die another way. I could have a heart attack the day after I was supposed to die the first time around. Who knows?”

“I… I….” Steve struggled for a long moment. This was the harder kind of honesty. He took a deep breath, steeled himself a little, and reached for a younger, and stronger, version of himself; the one who lived a straightforward life because it had made more sense to die honest than live crooked. He’d gotten a little more...flexible... over the years, he felt, and it was not to his credit, but sometimes he could still remember being a better man. “Howard,” he said “no matter what happens, I will be there for Tony. He was a good friend once, even though we didn’t see eye to eye a lot of the time. And...” He looked down for a moment. “You know… Peggy and I… we can’t...” He stopped, his hands tightened around each other. Howard had the horrified look of a man who hadn’t meant to cause pain, but accidentally had and doesn’t know how to stop it. He plowed on, determined. “I won’t let anything happen, Howard. You have a family, a life.” The words had a bittersweet meaning beyond Howard’s knowledge. “I’ve seen enough people lose that over the years, too many. Sometimes it’s been my fault. The least I can do is make sure that you have yours.”

“I know,” he said. “God, Steve, I didn’t mean…” He stopped. Clearly feeling that even acknowledging what Steve had meant was too much to bear. He started over. “Thank you. That means a lot, from you. There’s no one else, I would trust more to watch over my son than you.” He grinned suddenly, and it was a younger man’s smile, all charm and joy. “I mean, if you can’t trust Captain America...” Steve managed a huff of laughter. It was good to know someone still had a little faith in him. For a moment, they were two younger men, who still believed in whatever it was young men believed that old men did not.

Just then, the future started crying loudly from the room in front of them. Oh yes, that. They believed in that.

2010

This is supposed to be the easier time he has this conversation. It’s not. Peggy had cried. Steve had cried with her and there had been some comfort in that, in being able to hold onto someone who feels just as deeply and in the same ways as he did. Grief shared is not actually grief halved, but it was human and heartfelt.

Bucky, Steve thinks, has forgotten how to do that. The man he saved in 1947 was not the man he remembered from 1945. Steve had been fully expecting that. It had been a long time since Steve had come to terms with that. But he was also nowhere near the man Steve had met in 2016, which had been rather more of a surprise. The James Barnes of 2016 had lived through a much longer and more brutal captivity than anyone had any right to survive, and had come out with a very resigned attitude toward violence. It was a thing that happened to him, and he was very, very good at it, but he didn’t seek it, and even actively avoided it. Steve had been expecting that. He had been prepared for Bucky wanting a desk job in SHIELD with no field duty potential. He had even been ready for Bucky wanting to get a job as far away from government work as humanly possible. He had not been prepared for the terrible rage that had dominated Bucky’s personality ever since his second rescue. He had been surprised to see it at the beginning, as understandable as it was, but he had been heartbroken to realize that it wasn’t temporary. Bucky hadn’t left field work for a very long time.

The Stark family is a touchy subject to him. After his rescue, he had been the one to lead the early Commando teams, and worked closely with Howard for years. Once thrown together in a more casual, less stratified environment than the army, even with the looser command structure of the SSR, Bucky and Howard got along like a house on fire. Things had broken off somewhat in the late ‘50’s, but Steve never knew why, and then Bucky had met Dot, and had stabilized somewhat, so Steve let that dog lie. There hadn’t been any animosity per se, but they also hadn’t had the same personal or working relationship since. Despite that, the knowledge that once upon a never would be, he and Howard had been murderer and victim was always with Bucky. On the rare occasion Howard got pulled into field work, Bucky was his personal guard dog, no matter the year, and that had extended to the odd security detail in Howard’s civilian life as well. Bucky had taken every attempt on Howard’s life as a personal insult, and Howard had been the only person Bucky had allowed near his arm, including a rebuild in ‘69, until Tony took over the privilege. Howard, had never, as far as Steve knew, held Bucky responsible for what hadn’t happened. Bucky, frustratingly, did. ‘91 had been a difficult year.

Tony and Bucky had a very distant relationship, one where Bucky was never quite welcome or comfortable. Still, Bucky took his loyalties seriously, and his loyalty to Howard had passed quietly to Tony. Tony, all unawares, seemed to think of Bucky as one of his father’s old war buddies. Who happened to have Stark tech permanently attached to him and needed the odd tune up. This was often performed with less grace and consideration than Steve felt was warranted.

Bucky had long been the dissenting voice on the Iron Man Problem, as they called it, but Steve knew that this isn’t how any of them had expected things to go. While Howard, Obie, Maria, and Peggy had voted for neither telling Tony about Iron Man nor allowing Afghanistan to happen, and Steve had held that Tony should be told some things, but not have to be captured, Bucky had been the outsider. He had felt that Tony should not be told, but should be prepared and trained, and that Afghanistan should be allowed to happen, but under more controlled circumstances. In essence, where the others focused on protecting Tony and left Iron Man to fate, Bucky had wanted to engineer Iron Man’s creation. Those arguments had never gone well. Howard and Maria especially had taken a dim view. It had come to a head in ‘68 and Howard and Bucky hadn’t spoken for nearly a year.

In the present, Bucky is not taking any of this well, and Steve can’t tell if it’s guilt or just one of those odd left turns Bucky’s brain makes occasionally. Sometimes, he just doesn’t process things the way a normal person does. Usually he lets Dot help him, or, if he has to, takes his cues from Steve. This time though, Dot’s visiting her sister and since Tony has been a moot point between them for so long, Bucky is not willing to show any give. The end result is that Bucky locks down hard. It touches a bigger nerve in Steve than he is expecting, wrung out as he is from his own shock and grief. As though Tony is somehow an acceptable loss, his life no longer having value now that he’s gone. As though the only thing that is important is getting the body back, burying him, and then moving on. Like that matters in any way. That’s where the conversation starts to go downhill.

“We’re not going to Afghanistan.” Steve says, for the third time.

“Yeah, why is that again?”

“Because we’re retired. We’re too old. And there isn’t any point. He’s already gone, it’s over.”

“Are you sure that’s the reason?”

“What other reason do you need?” His teeth are gritted a little too tight, and he deliberately relaxes his jaw.

“The same reason it always is. You just don’t want to go.”

“I don’t want to go. Is that what you think this is?”

“Too old my ass. I’m 93 years old. My driver’s license says I’m 60. Because I look 60 and move like 40, and a damn healthy 40 at that and you’re not looking much worse off yourself.” It’s true that neither of them has aged as fast or as comprehensively as they ought to, and it is also true that despite their birth dates and Steve’s complicated timeline, they’re nowhere near as frail as they look. Their respective versions of the super soldier serum just don’t allow them to weaken like normal men. Even now, 5 to 1 odds are a good bet in their favor. Bucky’s probably closer to 10 to 1 between the arm and overall fitness.

“Maybe that isn’t what I mean when I said ‘too old.’”

“Then what do you mean? Because you’ve spent 70 years holding back, and what has it gotten us?” Steve thinks, ‘You.’ But manages not say it because it’s not what this conversation is about. Isn’t what it should be about. “Don’t you think, that if we had warned him, trained him. Hell, if we had just nudged him a little, this wouldn’t have happened?”

“Do you really think that that’s what this is about? He didn’t have training the first time around and he came out of it. This was… This was bad luck. There wasn’t anything we didn’t do that we should have.” Except stop him, obviously. There is an ugly pause, where Steve can see Bucky hesitate. Don’t say it, he thinks. Don’t.

“It’s funny you say that, seeing how he did come through it the first time. Means we did something. And it wasn’t the right thing.” Meaning, ‘you did something.’ Because this is Steve’s fault, and they all know it. The tether on Steve’s guilt snaps. It was an old tether. He’s been holding on to it for about 75 years now.

“I’ve done a lot of things, but I don’t make choices about how people live their lives. That’s up to them.” His fist is clenching on the table, and unclenching, his nails bend and relax under the pressure..

“And if it gets them killed before you decide to step in and help out?”

“Being Iron Man shouldn’t have had to define his life! He shouldn’t have had to live with that his whole life.”

“Well now he doesn’t have a life to define, so I guess that worked out.”

“Stop it. Forcing him to live with that would have been cruel. You of all people should know that.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, you never even were the Winter Soldier, Buck. But you sure as hell chose to let it screw up your life pretty well.”

“Yeah, well, you never even gave him the choice!”

“It was always his choice!” Steve pauses for a breath. “Being Iron Man wasn’t a life Tony ever wanted. It was one he was driven into, and eventually it killed him. But before it did that, it pushed him into a lot of decisions he regretted and a lot of time wasted. There was no reason to put him through that again.”

“It’s not about reason! It wasn’t your choice to make! He never even had a chance to become strong with you and Obie and everyone overprotecting him! Speaking of, where the hell was he? He was supposed to be there stopping this from happening at all.”

“I was trying to protect him from a path he would never come back from! It would have left scars he never healed from. You should understand! His whole life would have been wrecked and just because Iron Man came out of it, doesn’t make it okay! This isn’t just on Obie, this on all of us!”

“Yeah, because surviving the shit life throws at you makes it not worth living, huh? I don’t know when you turned into such a damn hypocrite, but it still. Wasn’t. Your decision. To make!”

“I never stopped him from making that decision. I just made sure he wasn’t forced into it.”

“Why? Who gave you the right to decide how the rest of us get spend our lives anyway? Why do you get to go around handing out happy endings and… and… just expect the rest of us to just follow along because you know what’s best for us?”

“It was never about that!”

“Then what has all this been about, Steve? Because ever since you came back you’ve been the one to decide how everyone’s life gets changed, and there are people still paying the price for that! Hell, why are you even still trying to justify your decisions. You just got Tony killed 15 years early.”

“I’m not God, Bucky! I didn’t walk into this with a plan. I just couldn’t…” He doesn’t know how to describe this. He feels like he’s been trying to explain for decades but no one understands what he says, no one hears him speaking. “I’d lost too much. Over and over. Everything. And then I had a chance to get it back. Everything else was just… If I was going to be selfish, I wanted to help as many people as I could. I couldn’t have lived with myself watching it all happen over again, without doing anything. I couldn’t do that to you, or Howard. Or Tony. And I know I messed up. But I’m out of second chances, and third ones. I’m tired of losing. It’s enough.”

“So you what, gave up on actually helping people with their own lives so you could just make yourself feel better instead?” Steve doesn’t quite put his head in his hands and start screaming, but it’s a close thing.

“What do you want from me, Buck? Dying in haze of glory or finding his body. Neither of those is going to fix any of this!”

“Who said I wanted anything? This isn’t about me! If you really cared about him as much you say you do, you wouldn’t leave him out there. What, he’s only important as long as he can make you feel good about your life choices? No one is dead until they’re home and buried!” Then he freezes and Steve looks away as a panic attack happens right in front of him. Bucky almost doubles over, breathing too fast and too hard. He doesn’t reach out as Bucky clutches at the side of the table, his left arm tessellating and shifting under the strain of messages it’s being sent, all counteracting and fighting each other to a null action. He does not watch as Bucky literally claws his way back to regular breathing, and he waits for him to wipe the sweat away from his face with a handkerchief before he looks up again. It is the only comfort he is allowed to give, a little bit of dignity. He has tried for years to give more, and the hardest lesson he has ever had to learn is that no matter how much help he would offer, he is limited by what will be taken, and in Bucky’s case, that is always, always less than is needed.

He feels like an ass. ‘We bury our own’ was Bucky’s personal motto, and remained the unofficial slogan of the STRIKE teams. ‘Missing, presumed dead’ were fighting words. Steve knows that. It’s still true that going after Tony is pointless now, in so many ways. He has already failed in the worst way possible, and retrieving Tony’s body is just a sop to their grief. But... the resentment drains out of him. He counts to 10. Then to 20. He locks his guilt back down. Then he tries to remember how to just be willing to do the right thing purely for the sake of it. He can be the man Bucky remembers. He still remembers how the old song goes.

“We’re still not going to Afghanistan.” Bucky open his mouth to argue, but Steve raises a hand. “But we’ll go talk to Fury. We’ll bring him home, Buck. You’re right. Of course you’re right. He still needs to come home. We’ll bury him properly, all of us together.” And then, he supposes, they’ll all have to find some way to move on. He remembers how that song goes too. He hates it.

1978

About once a month, Steve and Peggy went to the Stark’s for dinner. It started long ago as a series of regular working dinners. Then it became an opportunity to catch up and reconnect. Often, it had served as a way to make decisions about things outside of official channels, and in rare instances, an outsider had been invited in a calculated show of power and solidarity. Steve’s favorite nights were the ones where everyone came, the food was plenty, and the mood was high. It didn’t happen often, but he rarely felt more connected and fulfilled than in those moments. This was not going to be one of those days.

Today, Steve could generously be described as sulking because Peggy had been out of town for the better part of 2 weeks at a UN conference as the Commander of SHIELD. Worse, Bucky, as the decorated head of the STRIKE teams, had gone with her and Dot had taken the opportunity to have a short European vacation on the government’s dime. Steve’s presence, as the lowly Head of the Analysis Department, was not requested. He didn’t mind, didn’t even consider it a slight, though some of the other men in his department seemed to think it was one, but being without both of them for 2 weeks was making him, perhaps, just a little cranky. He reflected that he had turned into a sappy old man. Which was exactly what he wanted to be, so he really couldn’t complain. Sappy old men were happy people who lived full and generous lives and Steve had always hoped to be one someday.

That being said, Steve had always hated being lonely. Waking up alone, coming back to an empty house, and filling his days with endless busywork reminded him of long past dark times. He had told himself he was fine for years. He had believed that if he just kept marching forward, there would be something, someday to really fill his life again. He had never found it in the future. It was only after coming back, when waking up had become a joy instead of a chore, that he knew how empty that life had been.

As unsettled as the old shadows of his life were, they were not enough to dampen Steve’s hope that dinner at Howard’s would improve his mood somewhat. He ended up being disappointed. Howard wasn’t home when he arrived. He and Obie had both been called into the labs when something exploded a little. Maria didn’t seem particularly concerned, so Steve assumed it was probably fine, just messy. Dinner was still served, but with everyone else gone, it was down to Steve, Maria, and Tony. Even this would be fine with Steve, but Tony was clearly feeling just as sulky as Steve, and from the look on Maria’s face, had been driving her up the wall all day in ways only an angry 8 year old genius could. Dinner was hardly comfortable. At the end of it, Steve decided to take mercy on Maria and offered to play a board game with Tony until Howard got back or bed time, whichever came first. The relief on her face spoke volumes about the level of aggravation Tony could produce when provoked.

Tony bounced between playing Mousetrap and Monopoly. Steve was personally hoping for Mousetrap, because the serious look of concentration on Tony’s face while building the board, so like his older self’s most serious moments, was always a private riot to Steve. Then Tony looked at the clock and did some not particularly subtle internal math. He suddenly dropped both games for Risk. Steve did his own calculations, and knew that Tony had absolutely no plans of stopping for bedtime. Risk was serious business.

Steve hated losing Risk, and the only thing worse than losing Risk was losing it to a 7 year old who then went on to inform everyone else what had happened. He still hadn’t lived it down. It had been months. And then Bucky, a traitor of the first water if ever there was one, told everyone at the office, and even if they didn’t get the added kick of knowing that Steve was Captain America, there was still plenty of amusement to be had at the Head of Analysis being beaten at a strategy game by a 7 year old. The upshot of it all was that Steve caved, and they set up for what promised to be a grueling battle between an experienced tactical expert, and a cunning genius who’d been reading books on game theory. Tony was out for blood, convinced that if he played his cards and troops right, he could stay up late, bamboozle a grown up (his actual favorite game), and show up Steve again. Steve was out for revenge, pure and simple. He fully planned on teaching Tony that lesson about old age and experience beating youth and enthusiasm.

When Howard came home, the lights were still on in the den, and Steve’s car was still out front. Howard headed for the den, fearing the worst as to why Steve would have passed out there instead of going home or taking a guest room. He hoped it wasn’t because Peggy and Bucky were out of the country and Steve had wandered too close to memory lane. They all reacted to the ugly things in their past in different ways. He himself tended to drink and get into trouble, like a normal person. Steve just went quiet. And then something dramatic happened. Sometimes, if you caught him between the quiet and the drama, you could be on the right side of the explosion. It had been a good five years since he’d had to try and pull Steve out of a funk, and after the day he’d had, he really really hoped that he wasn’t about to find Steve, sitting in front of a dying fire, trying uselessly to get drunk on his very good whiskey. If there was a sketch pad out, he was calling Peggy, damn the time difference.

He poked his head into the den. There was a half finished game of Risk on the table, the fire was almost dead, and Tony was half on top of Steve as they snored on the couch in similar and very unflattering poses, mouths half open and drooling a little. Howard choked a little, and then sneaked back out. He needed a camera.

Howard gently shook Steve’s shoulder until he woke up. Steve looked confused and disoriented, and Howard was pleased that he was relaxed enough to wake up slowly; it was a good sign. Then Steve gave him a suspicious look and Howard knew he was grinning a little too much. Steve started to sit up, only then realizing he was being used as a pillow. Tony’s face was mashed peacefully into his shirt, dead to the world. His face broke into an honest pleased smile, the way it always did when Tony did something that showed trust or attachment, and he leaned back. Howard had always thought that Steve put a little too much stock in what Tony thought of him, and hoped that it wasn’t going to come back to bite him later. It was one of the odder left overs from the time travel. Steve tended to treat Tony as just as much an equal and friend as his honorary nephew, and Tony thrived on all the extra consideration.

“How’s the campaign, General?”

“I’m winning.” Steve said immediately, though he seemed about to fall asleep again. Howard looked at the table, but there were four different colors at play, and he could immediately tell it was one of their insane home brew campaigns because he could see pieces from Battleship strategically placed in the oceans. There were even little colored scraps of paper with tiny planes drawn on them flying over parts of Asia and South America. He gave up. No one besides Steve and Tony ever understood the rules of their personal Risk games. Howard had only made the mistake of asking once. It had been a long two hours.

“Are you sure?” He asked instead. “Because it looks to me like you got played for a Get Out of Bed Time Free card.”

“The benefits of being an uncle,” Steve said lazily, “are that I am old enough to break the rules and live far away enough to make that your problem.”

Howard snorted a little and sat down. It had been a very long day, and he kind of wished he had a little of that whiskey Steve was not drinking. He took another look at the game board and tried to make more sense of it. If he closed his eyes and squinted a little...

“Red’s got trouble in Africa.” He said.

“Yup. He tried to move over in to South America, but didn’t have enough troops. He misjudged how many bad rolls he could take.”

“He got Brazil though.”

“He’ll lose them both soon enough. That’s what happens when you spread yourself too thin. You get holes in your defense. Can’t protect everyone.”

“He did pretty good though. Yellow got most of Asia.”

“Not enough. He sacrificed solid footing and gambled for a big win, but he doesn’t have any reinforcements left, and he allowed his armies to get separated from each other. It was a bold strategy.”Steve looked a little distant. “Always going for the big win in the future, not looking closely enough at what’s happening in the now, and he always forgets the value of teamwork.” Howard frowned, Steve had that future lost look on his face. Howard dreaded that look. It never boded well,

“Sometimes you have to do that. If no one’s looking at it, the future’ll sneak up on you before you know it. Sometimes an individual has to make a stand.”

“And in the meantime, you start losing what you already have. You make sacrifices you can’t afford for something that might never happen.” He paused for a second and seemed to reconsider his own words in a different light. “Sometimes, they aren’t even your sacrifices to make.” Howard looked at him a little sharply. He didn’t know for sure what never-would-be Steve had been lost in before, but he knew what Steve was referring to with that statement. There were things Steve had never forgiven himself for. One was a future that wasn’t going to happen again, and Howard found it difficult to understand why it tormented him so much. The other was a choice they had all agreed on. Honestly, it might have been an unforgivable choice, but Steve carried the weight of it most of all, took the most responsibility for it, and they were all wary of when that strain started to show.

“It was just bad luck,”Tony piped in suddenly, making Howard jump, wondering when he had woken up. “The strategy was good, but the rolls were bad. I made too many sacrifice plays and it got me. I’ll do better next time.” It was hard to tell in the firelight, but Howard thought Steve’s face had lost all color.

“You gotta watch out for those sacrifice plays.” He said softly. “No one can afford too many of those.” Howard decided that enough was enough.

“Hey buddy, let’s get you to bed.”

“M’not tired. I wanna finish the game.”

“Maybe you can finish it tomorrow. Uncle Steve’s taking a guest room tonight. You can bother him about it over breakfast.” Howard lifted Tony off of Steve gently, because making him move upstairs under his own power would be more trouble than it was worth. His back creaked, a reminder that everyone was getting too old for this, not that you could tell looking at Steve or Barnes. Drat them.

“I don’t want to put you guys out, I can drive home.”

“No way, you should stay!” said Tony

“What he said,” said Howard, starting towards the second floor. “Plus, if you don’t think Jarvis has already prepared a guest room for you, then you’re crazier than Peggy thinks you are.”

“Well don’t tell her that, she might catch wise.”

“I don’t know, she seems pretty fond of you so far. You might just be in for the long haul. With her and the rest of us.” He tucked Tony into bed, minus shoes and socks, but if he wanted pajamas he was going to have to do it himself. Howard doubted he would bother. It was well past midnight and bedtime was theoretically 9:00. He started walking Steve to his guest room, though Steve probably could have found it himself. The house wasn’t that large, and it was hardly his first stay.

“You gonna be alright?” Howard asked because he had never been good at saying things more specifically.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” He hesitated at the door of the guest room a moment. “I never did like living with bad luck; preferred making a bit of my own. I guess I just have to hope the rolls will be a little kinder in the future.”

“That’s all anyone can do, you know? One of these days, you’ll have to forgive yourself being human. You manage to do it for the rest of us often enough.” Steve flashed a quick wry smile that didn’t cover anything.

“Ask me again in 34 years. See how I’m feeling then.”


	3. Living

2010

Tony can admit, if only to himself that he is close to panic. Yinsen said ‘you need more time’ and ran off with a gun. It’s true, Tony does need more time, but Yinsen needs to freaking survive this. So Tony sits, and sweats, waiting for the suit to finish calibrating, counting shots, and listening for yelling or footsteps, and every time there is a lull in the distance or a nearby shuffle, his heart stops, but the timer doesn’t.

20...19...18…

Yinsen is priority one. He has to get him out first. He’ll worry about the hardware later.

17...16...15…

They don’t have anything in the way of supplies, so he’ll need to make a flashy enough exit to get attention, and then hope it’s good attention.

14...13...12…

Oh God, are those footsteps? Where the hell is Yinsen? He’d better not end up stepping on him just outside the door.

11...10...9…

The lights are off, the only things he can see are lit by the soft glow of the reactor and the screen. The sound of shots has stopped. Oh God, Yinsen.

8...7...6…

The suit is good. The engineering is good. It is going to work just fine because they tested it before he put it on and it is all going to work without a hitch.

5… 4…

Yinsen is not allowed to be dead. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

3…

He’ll buy Yinsen’s entire freaking town and relocate them, just please be alive.

2…

Come on, come on, come on…

1…

Go.

Tony doesn’t wait for a dramatic moment and he is neither strategic nor graceful. On the other hand, the guy whose head he squished with one punch isn’t getting back up and the armor isn’t having any trouble reflecting bullets. So, yay.

He smashes through the door and out of the inner cave where he’s lived for the past 3 months. His steps crush the ground with inevitability. Every few feet someone tries to stop him. He slams more people into walls. He can’t feel how much damage he’s doing through the armor, so he hits harder just in case. The eye slits are almost impossible to see through even without the poor lighting. He’s sort of grateful he can’t see what he’s doing to these guys properly, but he also doesn’t see Yinsen anywhere, so it’s definitely a bug that’ll need fixing. Meanwhile, everything he hits stops moving, screaming, fighting. Stops. He does not.

Almost at the end of the tunnel there is a door and one terrified man begging to be saved. Tony slams him headfirst into it, leaving wet streaks against the rust and metal. Then he hammers his way out through a cloud of dust and useless bullets. Then, because he is actually the best, he crunches right through all the idiots cleverly shooting at his armor. Ugh. Normal people.

The suit is working perfectly both as armor and as a physical enhancer. Could do with some better armaments. He steps on someone’s arm, mostly on purpose. The bone gives out before his sense of balance does, which makes sense. The suit is stable as hell, but the handling is just godawful. He’s never actually driven a truck before, but if he had, it would totally be better than the crappy steering on this suit. That’s like number 3 on the fix-it list.

He counts people as he goes, trying to get a head count and make an estimate about how many more there are, but it’s useless. The number of men in this base fluctuates constantly, sometimes there was only one guard at their door, other times five. So now he’s stuck playing whack-a-mole on semi-endless mode.

He keeps trying to swivel his head down to look at the floor, and it’s not working out too well. Which is why visibility is on the top of the fix-it list. He needs to find Yinsen. He needs Yinsen to be alright, dammit. But Yinsen isn’t in the tunnels he is stomping through, and all the bodies on the ground are the ones he’s leaving behind. Except for the one genius who tries to shoot his helmet point blank. That’s more like assisted suicide in Tony’s book. Ricochet is a thing, guys.

Suddenly, there is daylight. He’d be more distracted by his first glimpse at natural light in so many months, if it isn’t for the tableau in the middle of the room. Raza has a freaking modified grenade launcher aimed at his head, and he would deal with that, except Yinsen is kneeling in the center of the room with a gun pressed to his head by a turbaned thug. Tony reacts, (Raza isn’t the only one with a rocket in this room) but then freezes because he doesn’t actually have a plan. Which is, you know, a problem.

It’s a Mexican stand off he can only lose. If he gives up now, they’re both dead. If he takes his shot, Yinsen will probably die, but his odds on escape are pretty good unless Raza manages to shoot straight while a rocket flies at his head. Unlikely. If he shoots at the thug then he might accidentally explode Yinsen, so that’s out. Door number 2 is clearly the correct answer here, but... All he has to do is take the statistically correct choice, make the strategic sacrifice to win the battle. It’s the smart choice, the right choice. This is a non-cooperative non-zero sum game and there is only one turn.

“Take the shot.” It’s Yinsen. He’s clearly come to the same conclusion as Tony. Does Yinsen read game theory?

“You have a family.” Talking is good. Tony likes talking because he thinks faster than anyone can talk, and he needs another option. He doesn’t like the ones he’s got right now. They suck.

“Actually, I don’t.”

“You lied?” Tony double takes and the whole things almost goes south right there. “Not so fast, cueball.” He refocuses his sights back on Raza, but his arm is starting to feel very heavy. The strength to weight ratio is crap. Number 4 on the list. Sweat drips down his back. It tickles.

“I did not lie. My family is dead. Nothing can bring them back.” The thug pushes the gun further against Yinsen’s head, blunt metal digging into skin, rubbing against bone, a threat. Yinsen barely hesitates. “You still have your family, Stark. Do not waste this chance.”

Tony steels himself. He hesitates. His arm locks again in preparation to fire. He freezes. He remembers the soldiers in the desert; thinks of the smear left on the tunnel door. He can’t. Not in cold blood. He knows the cost of the sacrifice play now. It’s too high.

“Take the armor off, Stark, and we will spare your lives! You can both still be useful to us. There’s no reason anyone else has to die today.” Raza’s words bounce right by Tony’s attention because he knows a bullshit sell when he hears one.

“Tony, please! Take the shot.”

He takes another deep breath.

“Ah, screw it.” He goes for broke, firing up at the ceiling above Yinsen’s head.

Several things happen at once. The ceiling explodes, Tony throws himself to the side as much as he can to avoid the freaking grenade (seriously? A rocket propelled grenade? Did Justin Hammer get drunk one night?”) that flies at his head, and the thug pivots hard on one foot, and shoots Raza. He has damn good aim too. The bullet hits the cheek at an angle and continues up through the back of the head. Then random good guy thug gets taken out by the ceiling.

As Tony works himself laboriously back to his feet (Seriously, the handling just re-prioritised itself to number 2), Yinsen checks on their new thug friend.

“He’s still alive.” He says, but it’s written all over his face that he, himself, is alive past when he wanted or expected to be. Which is just not okay.

“Hey!” says Tony, and he totally does not sound panicked, because he does not do panic. “We’re getting out of this alive. All of us. You, me, and thug #6 over there are all getting out of this hole. We do not die here. Okay?” Yinsen is looking at him strangely, but Tony feels he’s making a decent amount of sense. “I mean it. You wanna die, you’re going to do it out of here, free.” Oh shit, that sounds wrong. “Except not, because I just saved your ass and if you go die after all that I’m gonna be… I’m gonna be really really upset. Okay? Just really… pissed off. So don’t do it.” Yinsen hesitates, and then finally nods. Tony takes a deep breath, and looks out the cave, where the magic of differing light levels makes things so much easier.

“Okay,” he says, taking stock. “Here’s how this is gonna go.”

About 3 minutes and one major, attention getting, weapon destroying explosion later, Tony does his best to not squish Yinsen or his new thug #6 buddy as they come down in a sand dune about half a mile from the explosion. He and Yinsen jury rig a stretcher out of the biggest piece of armor they can find and some wiring. It mostly sort of works. They start walking because sitting still and hoping Americans find them first seems like a bad idea. Not that walking and hoping Americans find them first is necessarily better. It just feels that way. They get lucky, Americans find them first.

1998

Howard Stark did not die in a car crash. He was not murdered. Howard died because he was a normal 74 year old man who’d spent decades working with dangerous materials that no one understood until he figured them out. It eventually caught up to him. The cancer had been bad, and terminal, but there had been less time than anyone thought when he picked up pneumonia in the hospital.

Steve was at the funeral. Not only the big flashy public one, where the powerful and morally dubious gathered to nod at each other, but the smaller memorial service where the real friends and family gathered to say their goodbyes.

Tony was drunk. It had been a hard 2 years for the Stark family. First, Maria had passed, a congenital heart defect, then had come the cancer, and suddenly, before anyone could find their footing, there was only one Stark left. Steve didn’t really begrudge Tony the chance to get drunk. He just wished that Tony was a quieter, more convenient drunk. One who maybe didn’t crack wise, or blatantly take pulls from a bottle during the ceremony, or try to turn the reception into a dance rave. Bucky, who was taking Howard’s death particularly hard, was starting to look a little strained around the edges by that point. Even Obie, usually a font of never ending patience when it came to Tony’s shenanigans, didn’t seem to be in the mood to deal with him. So Steve made a command decision, put aside his own mourning, at least temporarily, and got Tony out.

‘Out’ wasn’t really that far away. There was a fashionable little gazebo on the far side of the lake near the summer house where the reception was being held. It was quiet and peaceful, but the whole place reminded Steve of another house near a lake and another memorial service. It was actually a little jarring to see Tony there, looking so young. Young, sullen, and still drunk, but without the lure of an audience that always brought out either his best or worse behavior. Steve had often felt that Tony left mostly alone was a far better man personality wise than Tony around a group of any size greater than maybe 3. Unless the world was literally about to end. Unfortunately, Tony attracted crowds the way the young, rich, and charming always did. Worse, he had a taste for it.

Steve waited for the alcohol to take its course, for the bravado to drop, and for the edges of Tony’s anger, his preferred first reaction to any negative emotion, to wear off. Long practice had taught Steve that what Tony really needed in these moments was someone who refused to react to his initial outbursts. If you waited Tony out, a more honest man came to the surface. Steve had nothing but time. He’d made sure of it.

By the time the sun was setting, and Steve had started a fire in the gazebo’s central brazier, Tony had moved from sullenness to bitterness, past that to anger, then, in a sudden turn, to sheepish regret which in turn sparked more anger, and had finally settled into a heavy contemplative state. Steve did his best impression of the friend he had once been to a man he met once in a future that would never happen. It was a lot like being a guidance counselor again. He listened, and offered words of support, and encouraged Tony’s better moments, ignoring his worse ones. He had learned a lot about troubled young men at some point, probably during the war when there were no counselors and a good CO kept an eye on his men’s psychological state. Bucky had been better at it, honestly, but Steve had learned to shift for himself during the months after the fall. Sometimes, if you refused to acknowledge the worse natures of people, if you looked and really saw the better man or woman everyone longed to be, you could reach out to that part of them. Once upon a time he’d been better at it. Long years had a made him a little more cynical about human nature than he liked to be, but it helped that he knew Tony, past, present, and possible future. He knew exactly who Tony wanted to be someday, and knew that he was capable of being even more than that. It made it easier to put up with everything else.

“I just feel like there were more things I should have said. I think I kind of sucked at being a good son. I mean, I know he sucked at being a good dad.” This last was said with a slight glance at Steve, for confirmation or reaction it was hard to say. Tony did that sometimes, made a deprecating joke and then waited for someone to agree with him so he could hold it as some kind of deep universal truth. Steve kept his face passive. He could neither confirm nor deny. It wasn’t his place to do either.

“You both tried your best. Not everyone gets along the way they think they should. It’s okay.”

“Oh jeez, yeah thanks. That really helps. Any other platitudes to toss out? Maybe, ‘your father only wanted the best for you’ or ‘someday you’ll understand him.’ Steve, a little past his own limit on Tony for the night, curbed his annoyance. Sort of.

“How about ‘to everything there is a season… a time to mourn, and a time to dance.’” Tony looked deeply shocked for a moment, that was by far the most pointedly sarcastic Steve had ever been with him, and then almost smiled.

“Are you actually mad at me? That would be a first.” He didn’t look too worried, but then again he was also still kind of drunk.

“No, I’m not,”said Steve, eyes heavenward, willing it to be true. “I don’t get angry at people without a good reason. What you did tonight was stupid, and disrespectful, and you’re going to have to apologize, at least to Peggy, for it later, but it’s not something to get angry over.”

“Yeah? How pissed do you think dad would be right now?” Steve took a deep breath or two, forcing himself to relax while he tried to think of the right thing to say. Howard had overshadowed Tony’s entire life, more or less by accident, and had never understood Tony’s relative lack of ambition. Steve thought an ambitious Tony would have been a much worse problem, but understood Howard’s frustration to some extent. It didn’t matter as much to him, because as far as he was concerned, Tony had earned an easy life this go round. He considered the question, comparing Tony’s limited perception of Howard as his father within the greater context of his own long history with Howard as a friend.

“Well,” he said slowly. “if he got too mad, it would be a little hypocritical, considering how drunk he got just before his televised Presidential Award ceremony.”

“Wait, really?”

“As he told it, he tried to proposition Bess Truman during the meet and greet, but he slurred the words so badly no one caught it. Then he threw up on the Secretary of Defense's shoes afterwards.” Tony looked so poleaxed, Steve chuffed a laugh. “Your father didn’t hate you, you know. And he didn’t always disapprove of you. He just recognized, better than anyone, how much potential you have. And, more than anyone, he wanted you to reach for it.” Tony stiffened at the implied insult.

“You know, most people who graduate at 17, and then get multiple patents under their name, as well as help run a multi-million dollar company, count as success stories. To everyone except my father I guess. You know, I bet I should have thrown being Captain America on top of that. Maybe I should have gone for the presidency.” Steve managed to not react.

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“But it’s what you said. You know, you’re right. There was always some way I could have been less of a disappointment to him, but I just never quite reached that point did I?”

“People,” said Steve, and his voice was heavier than he meant it to be. “are not made up of a single moment in their life, or a single accomplishment, or a single mistake. Don’t let your memory of your father be shaped just by things he messed up, or the moments where he failed. Remember the times he was there, and the times he tried. You’re both bigger than that. And everything you accomplish in the future, your dad would have been proud of, Tony. You’ve got a whole lifetime ahead of you for that. Your life is going to be so much bigger than your father gets to see. But I’m sure it’s going to be better than he ever imagined.” Tony looked away, into the darkening trees, hiding his eyes. Steve waited, watching the flames and then the water. It was getting dark, and the shape of the shoreline was too familiar, and resonant of a future he still feared, to be comforting.

“He should be here.” Said Tony, finally. His voice cracking a little. “He should be here to see it. No matter what I do… he won’t know.” Steve shuffled himself over to sit next to Tony, dropping his arm gently around not-quite shaking shoulders.

“He already knew. He was already proud, of everything you did and ever will do.” Tony cried in earnest then, and Steve grieved with him. He grieved for the quick acerbic wit and quicker smile of a young man, and the sly sense of humor that had taken their place. He grieved for opportunities won and lost and hopes unfulfilled. He mourned the loss of a true friend, who had offered advice when he could, and distraction when he could not. He regretted the loss of a confidante and ally against the coming day, and remembered anew the heavy regrets and doubts that would haunt him, he was sure, until his own death. There was now one less person to share them with.

The stars drifted and the flames flickered down. Eventually, they settled themselves enough to go back to the house.

“I know I said he would be proud of everything, past, present, and future” said Steve as they walked back together, “but, actually, he probably wouldn’t have been too thrilled with the dance party, come to think of it.” Tony blinked a little blearily at him, so he added “two left feet you know, he stepped on your mother’s toes all the time.” Tony choked a laugh.

2010

Steve is in Malibu when the plane lands and Tony, looking shocky, but centered, walks out with a bandaged arm and some shaky sarcasm. He know mostly what has happened. Clint Barton, up for his mandatory Undertow assignment, has nearly gotten his head bashed in, a doctor named Yinsen hads been temporarily brought into the country on a humanitarian basis, and Tony has done the vast majority of saving himself by himself. The future is marching cheerfully on, oblivious to Steve’s attempts to circumscribe it.

After that, Tony does what Tony does best. He shuts everyone out, throwing himself into a mysterious project Steve would bet anything is a red and gold suit of armor, and disappears from both his public and private lives as chaos overturns Stark Industries. Steve is sure Pepper sees him which can only be for the best. He is also sure that Obie sees him and that may be less so.

Officially, the SHIELD investigation turned up nothing. Unofficially, Obie has not been talking much to anyone else in Operation Prophecy, and Fury is having kittens over one of the future’s trusted guardians being a possible traitor. Be that as it may, Obadiah Stane is theoretically innocent, and nothing can be found tying him to anything unsavory. It’s absolutely amazing how much that does not comfort him, or Bucky, who has launched his own private investigation. Steve is not really worried about Bucky getting himself into more trouble than he can handle, but he still thinks it’s a touch reckless. Bucky is also too old for this kind of thing, whether he accepts that or not. However, Bucky still has resources he can pull, and Steve has a pretty good idea who he went to first. Nat never tells him anything anymore, but she’s also terrible at lying to him and isn’t talking to him either. More to the point, he knows how Bucky thinks. If Nat isn’t helping him, he’ll eat Mjolnir when it turns up.

Steve, despite warnings from everyone except Peggy to not talk to Tony, does his best to get in touch. Pepper is kind, polite, personable, and as tractable as a brick wall. In other words, a superb personal secretary. Steve leaves messages. He drops hints. He even sends a letter. By the end of four months, he’s not even sure that Tony knows he wants to talk to him. Then Bucky disappears, not saying where he’s going, but with a rucksack that practically screams trouble. Steve gets antsy. He is uncomfortable, stuck not quite knowing what to do. Tony is in California, doing an excellent impression of a turtle, and Steve is in New York, knowing he needs to explain, dreading the conversation, and hesitating to travel so far when he’s not even sure he can get in to see Tony.

Peggy finally has enough. She buys his plane tickets, has the housekeeper pack his suitcase, and then changes the locks so that when he comes home from yet another private debriefing (haranguing) with Fury about the state of the future, his key does not work. She’s almost cackling when she tells him from the balcony that he can come home when he’s made up with Tony and not before. Steve, too smart to argue with his wife when she’s in such an irascible mood, and grateful despite himself, takes his suitcase. He also arranges with the housekeeper to keep a close eye on things until he gets back. 2016 is too close. He resents every step away he takes, no matter how necessary or important.

He takes a rental car from LAX to Tony’s house in Malibu. There’s a hot second where he’s not sure JARVIS will let him in, but then the gate opens. Steve did the smart thing and brought donuts, because he already knows Tony is tunnel visioning himself too hard on his project. He reminds JARVIS to tell Tony every few minutes about the donuts, and eats a couple while waiting for the constant nagging to break through Tony’s shell. It takes about half an hour before Tony emerges, looking distracted, bemused, and hungry. Steve offers donuts before conversation.

“Uncle Steve, I.. uh... didn’t know you were in town.” Tony sounds like he’s desperately trying to remember if Steve told him he was going to be here. “JARVIS, did I know Uncle Steve was going to be here?”

“No sir, I believe that would be impossible. Since you have failed to return any of his 51 calls, listen to the 12 messages he left, or read the letter he sent last month. In fact, I am not sure how you could possibly be aware of---”

“Yeah, thanks, JARVIS.” Steve offers a wry smile while Tony looks guilty.

“It’s alright. But I do need to talk to you.”

“Well, I’ve got time. I’ve got time, right JARVIS?”

“That does indeed seem to be the case, sir”

“Yup see, tons of time.” Tony looks awkward and uncomfortable at being surprised, but he flops onto the couch anyway, covering uncertainty with aggressive informality. “This isn’t about Afghanistan, is it? Because I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“It’s not about Afghanistan. It’s a story. About some things that happened, some things that didn’t happen, and some other things that are not going to happen.” Tony looks up.

“That’s… unusually cryptic of you. Is this a long story, cause I’m kind of tired.”

“I’ll give you the short version, the long version would take a lifetime to tell.” Steve smiles a little, but doesn’t really feel it... “In 1945...”

“In 2023, you discovered time travel. The original Avengers, plus a few friends, went back and found the Infinity Stones, but tipped off Thanos while they were at it, and he ended up following them back. Dr. Banner managed to save half the universe just before he got there. Then there was a fight. It was all out war, like no one today could really imagine. At the end, the stones ended up between you and Thanos. You got them first. You destroyed his entire army, but you… you didn’t make it. After that, the stones had to go back to their original times, so I volunteered to take care if it. Then I just never went back. There wasn’t a lot to go back to. Not a lot that mattered, really.”

There had been Bucky, but Bucky had understood how much Steve needed to stop fighting, and he’d also known that as long as Captain America existed, there was always a fight. Steve had needed to go and everything he wanted and needed was only a footstep away. Bucky had given his blessing wholeheartedly, but there had been no question of him joining Steve. He hadn’t been a big fan of the past when he was living in it, felt far too distant and perhaps guilt-ridden to try and fit back into that life, and now that he was mostly protected from Hydra, he was as happy where he was as anywhere, or when. Maybe more so, because the future had therapists and Wakanda had force fields. When it came right down to it, they had separate lives, and neither was willing to force the other into abandoning the life they needed out of selfishness. That being said, Steve still hoped to see him someday again. They were still family. This time it is just Steve’s turn to take the long way round, and come back changed.

As for everything else… No, he has rarely missed the future. It always feels like a threat to him. That which takes away the things and people he loves. But not Tony, not yet. He has another chance with Tony.

“Any chance you’re actually just crazy?”

“No.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna need a moment.”

“Take your time.” There is a long awkward silence where Steve can sense Tony not so much thinking things over as reacting to the uncomfortable atmosphere of Steve waiting.

“You want a drink?”

“Sure.” Tony gets up, starts to head for the liquor cabinet, and then suddenly comes to a decision mid-stride. “No, hang on. You’re saying you came back to the past, lived your whole life, changed everyone else’s life, and what, there’s still another you sitting in the North Sea?”

“Yes.”

“So, what, is this like, the world’s slowest murder/suicide?”

“Not exactly. Steve Rogers is going to be found and revived in 2012, right on time. There are things he’s needed for.”

“Right. Okay, that right there. I have a problem with that.” Steve has a problem with that too. He’s had a problem with it for decades. He’s willing to bet he and Tony have different problems with it right now though. “You’re doing all this to fix a mistake you made in the future. Literally, all this is just some… what… ego trip for you? You screwed up, then decided you knew what was best for everyone and created a… a… a Stepford world for yourself, where everything’s perfect. Unless you’re destined to save the world, because then screw you! Or me, as it turns out. I mean, God, what even am I to you?”

“My friend.” says Steve, immediately, earnestly.

“Really? Because it sure doesn’t feel like it! In fact, you must have known exactly where I was. So the question is, where the hell were you? You’re my friend, right? So where the hell were you six months ago?” Steve can’t answer. He could offer Bucky’s reasons. They’re good reasons, but they aren’t Steve’s reasons. He never believed them. His reasons are tattered, cowardly, pathetic things, and he’s ashamed of them. He can’t possibly offer them as excuses against Tony’s legitimate anger. ‘I’m too old. I haven’t fought anyone in 50 years. I couldn’t risk a prison sentence. And Peggy…’ He can’t say, ‘I tried’ because his frequent arguments with Bucky and Fury were just that, arguments. Words in the air that had done nothing for anyone. It was 1943 all over again. All he could do was talk and pick pointless fights. As before, there was a reason, but of course, the excuse didn’t matter more than the result, the failure. There was an innate hypocrisy to it that had curdled his stomach back then too. Just because there wasn’t another choice to make, didn’t mean the one he made was the right one. It was just the easy one.

“All my life,” he says after a moment, “I’ve just wanted to do the right thing. Tony, you were never supposed to be in Afghanistan. What happened 6 months ago was never part of any plan. There are no excuses for why you weren’t rescued. I’m sorry about that. I really am.”

“The right thing? How is any of this the right... No, don’t even answer that. This is… this is… You lied to me. You lied to me for decades. Since before I was even born you’ve... I don’t know who you are, but if this is who Captain America is, then you should stay buried. The world doesn’t need your kind of help. You can take your ‘right thing’ and shove it right up your-”

“This isn’t just about you, Tony! There are other people whose lives and futures are at stake. You’re as much a part of this as any of us now. You’ve already started. Gulmira was the first, but it won’t be the last.”

“Screw you.” Tony is up in his face. “My choices don’t have anything to do with you. You want to be my friend? Friends don’t use each other.” He’s so close, Steve can see the exact moment the penny drops, can see righteous anger turn to… something worse, something sickened and disgusted. Betrayed.

“Oh, so this is why dad… He knew, didn’t he? All this. Of course he knew. Wow. All those years I thought it was me. I was a disappointment. I wasn’t good enough for him. But it was you. All this time. There was never anything I could do to be good enough because I’m not Iron Man.” He’s bone white, and Steve reaches out, almost automatically, because he looks like he might collapse. Tony lurches away from him, half stumbling, eyes wide, like Steve’s hand will burn him. He actually falls a bit, and Steve freezes.

“Tony… that’s not. That’s not what your father thought. And it’s never how I thought. You are Iron Man. You always were and will be. That was never the issue.”

“I am not Iron Man.” Tony gets to his feet and he’s got a look on his face that Steve recognizes because the last time Tony had that look, they stopped speaking for approximately seven years. “And I never will be. Find someone else to sacrifice. I’m out.” Tony strides to the staircase, shoulders tight with rage, and disappears. Steve is sure that if he tries the door, it will not open.

2005

“Tony, can we talk a moment?” Steve already suspected this conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere useful. Tony, as per usual for him lately, was mostly drunk.

“Oh hey, I thought the old people party was already over. Sorry Uncle Steve, this is the non-geriatrics only party.” It was the annual Stark Summer S_oirée_, a testament to his mother’s influence and Pepper’s stubbornness. Steve wished it was just the party to blame, but as far as he could tell, Tony had spent about half his time over the last three years drunk, and the rest of it hung over, busy, and bitter. Steve didn’t know why, but he knew he was getting pretty tired of excusing Tony’s petty cruelties and carelessness because of it. Especially today.

Last week, he’d watched “Captain America: The Building of an American Hero.” Someone, somewhere had gotten the bright idea of creating a sixty year anniversary documentary about Captain America, and Steve vaguely remembered fielding a couple of phone calls for Peggy asking for her story. She hadn’t been interested and he hadn’t heard anything more about it. It was a smear piece. Captain America held a special place in the heart of America. He was a celebrated and respected historical figure. As much as Steve’s opinion on that had waxed and waned over the years, he could respect people’s pride and faith in the legacy. It also wasn’t really his any more. It belonged to another Steve Rogers and he had thought it would stay safe until that man needed it. The biopic itself was enough to set his teeth on edge. Tony’s involvement was something else entirely.

The documentary started by bringing up Erskine’s Hydra connections, if you could call being German and having your research stolen, a Hydra connection. It went on to casually take note of some of Howard’s more irresponsible choices and failures that had survived historical white washing and sniffed a little at the moral dubiousness of the SSR’s very broad mandate. Then it started on Steve. It got ugly. Every back handed compliment from disgruntled superiors, and personal criticism from soldiers more amused than impressed by ‘Captain America: the dancing monkey’ that they could find was given a dramatic reading. A great deal was taken out of context, including his letters to and from Bucky in ‘43. It wasn’t even being called a homosexual that bothered him so much as the snide, smirking way they did it. The USO footage was as embarrassing as possible, though really that was the least altered part of the program. By the time it got to the rescue of the 107th, the historical ‘experts’ were shaking their heads dramatically over its ‘staging’ and the gullibility of a nation desperate for a hero. By the end, they’d made it clear that Captain America was a fraud, a hero in name and by political necessity only, and the star witness, the only person with any personal connection to anyone discussed in the film, was Tony Stark.

Steve and Peggy had watched it together. Peggy had been slanderously passed off as little more than a honey trap used to keep him in line. They hadn’t bothered bringing her marriage up, but Peggy’s personal life was pretty buried after the war. It was a very small favor. They had both been shocked. It wasn’t like they had never been media targets before, but it had always been expected, usually tied to something Peggy did that annoyed someone with press connections. This… there was no reason for this. And it hurt. Steve was surprised at how much it hurt. Sixty years gone since he had been Captain America. Seventy, since he had been the Captain America they talked about. But it still hurt. It would do worse if the other him woke up and had it thrown in his face. This hadn’t existed the first time around. He had been aware of all the documentaries and movies that had been made about him, and he had been both surprised and grateful at how fondly he was remembered by the public. He wasn’t sure what any of them had done that would cause this kind of backlash against Captain America.

He hadn’t meant to talk to Tony about it, honestly. He hadn’t said a word when Tony personally called to invite them to the _soirée_. Then Rhodes made a pointed comment about respecting the uniform during the luncheon, and Tony had not let sleeping dogs lie. So, he used his Uncle privileges to pull Tony aside. He had been putting off having a serious conversation with Tony about his recent life decisions for a couple years now. That was one part it not being his responsibility to police Tony’s life, one part Obie reassuring him that Tony was fine and just going through an early mid-life crisis, and one part lack of good timing. Steve was aware that this was also a bad time, and he knew being angry wasn’t going to help, but, enough was enough.

“I don’t even see what you’re upset about. So I drink; it’s practically genetic, a family tradition. And it’s not like the movie was a big hit. The only people who saw it are probably ancient.” They were in Tony’s workshop, the one place guests were not allowed. He had started fiddling with a ‘thing.’ Steve didn’t know what it was, Tony’s projects had always and would always be beyond him. The fiddling was a pretty typical sign of Tony not wanting to have this discussion. Which sign Steve ignored, because life was tough and some things were unavoidable.

“Sure, ancient. Like your Aunt Peggy. I think the phrase they used was “had a lot of assets, but none that had anything to do with strategy.’” Tony had the grace to look ashamed.

“Okay, in my defense, I didn’t know they were going to say that, I didn’t say that, and they actually cut all the nice things I said about her. Want me to sue them for that? I could probably sue them for that. I have...lawyers… I think.”

“She’s not the only one. Abraham Erskine was a good man who died trying to help this country. He doesn’t deserve to be attacked because he got in the way of whatever problem you’re having with Howard right now.” Steve hadn’t missed the comment about family; this was about Howard, somehow. It always was. He didn’t miss the dark look Tony shot him either.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought dad was the only Captain America fanboy around. Actually, I guess I’m not all that surprised.”

“Meaning?” Tony was treading on thin ice.

“Nothing. Just, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so, you know.” The look Tony gave him was downright suggestive, “Does Aunt Peg buy you underwear with little shields on them?” His hands tightened and relaxed rhythmically behind his back while he rode through the flash of rage and secondhand humiliation. He had been Steve Roberts for so long now, his identity was conflated between the unspoken truths and the oft repeated lies. Probably the only reason things didn’t get a lot worse right there was because of the instantaneous guilty look on Tony’s face, and a lifetime of practicing self control.

“Is there,” he finally managed, “some good reason you’re acting like an ass? Because you’ve been doing a bang up job of looking like one in front of God and everyone. Do you really think Maria would be proud of you right now?” And that was when he lost Tony for the day.

“Don’t pull mom into this! Dad didn’t deserve her, and you don’t… Just… don’t.”

“I’m not going to ask again, Tony. What is this really about? I’m getting pretty tired of the way you’re treating everyone around you as a whipping boy because you’re angry at a dead man. It’s not fair and I’m about done putting up with it.”

“My personal life is none of your business, okay? None! You were dad’s friend, but that doesn’t give you the right to pry into my life.” Steve tightened his jaw.

“Your dad’s friend. Really? That’s how you want to play this?” Tony just looked defiant. “Fine then, as your dad’s friend, you’re being an ass. Try to pull your head out of yourself long enough to grow up.” Then he stalked out, not bothering to hide his anger in front of the other party-goers.

Steve was still upset that night. Unable to sleep, he found himself sitting in the living room so he didn’t bother Peggy with his tossing and turning. He was still seething. He knew better than to take things Tony said in the heat of the moment to heart. Of the two of them, Tony’s temper tended to be worse. When Tony got really angry he was extremely vindictive and his natural obliviousness towards others feeling turned to outright callousness bordering on cruelty. In a lot of ways, Tony had the uncontrolled rage of a teenager and he had never quite gotten used to reining himself in. Steve supposed sourly that it was hard to learn self-control when everyone forgave you before you ever bothered to apologize. In better hours, he worried about that anger of Tony’s. He feared what it could become, implacable and unforgiving.

Tony’s lasting anger, deserved or not, had been the greatest obstacle to their reconciliation in every situation where they fought. Steve liked forgiving others. He respected the motivations and reasons that people fought for. God knew, in that whole mess in Germany the first time around, he had never held Tony in contempt for his actions. He understood Tony’s guilt about Sokovia. He could even sympathize with the desire for a better system. But in the end, Steve recognized the inherent danger of restricting action when action was needed then. Tony had seen it too, if just too late. He had not, after all, waited for a UN sanction decided by committee to chase Steve and Bucky to Siberia. Ironically, it might have been better if he had. Tony had eventually returned the favor of respecting Steve’s decision, but he had always blamed Steve almost solely for the destruction of the Avengers, and if he had ever changed his mind about Steve’s responsibility for Thanos, he had never said as much. In better hours, he knew not to believe what Tony said in anger. This was not a better hour. This was 3 AM, and he couldn’t sleep. It was a testament to his distraction that he didn’t notice Peggy until she sat next to him on the couch.

“Peggy?”

“Oh Steve,” She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her automatically. Some things were like that after so long. Care and affection were rote by now, given thoughtlessly, if not without appreciation. He hoarded these moments, knowing full well the coming drought. “why does everything have to be so serious with you all the time?”

“Bad habit, I suppose.”

“You’re lucky I knew what a worrier you were when I married you.”

“Yes, yes, I am.” He knew Peggy was teasing, but he couldn’t be teased out of his mood tonight so easily. It was not a better hour yet. She might have more luck in the morning, when he’d be too tired to resist her. He wished she hadn’t followed him out, but he also knew how hard it was to sleep alone after so long.

“Don’t hold yourself responsible for Tony. His actions aren’t your fault, past, present, or future.” He didn’t question how Peggy knew. They always knew each other’s worries by now.

“I’m not.”

“Oh, aren’t you?” It’s not really a question. He sighed. They have had this conversation before.

“If I hadn’t changed the past...” He doesn’t even need to say all the words.

“If you hadn’t changed the past he would be the exact same person doing other stupid things. Or so I’ve heard.”

“I’d hoped he’d be happier this time around. I wanted to at least give him that.”

“You aren’t responsible for other people’s happiness, Steve. I don’t know where you got the idea that you could be, but you can’t. Give Tony everything he wants and needs, but he still won’t be happy. All that will happen is he’ll blame his unhappiness on you, because you’ll both be telling yourselves that you are supposed to fix everything. Regardless of how impossible that is.”

“He might be right to blame me.”

“Oh, pish-tosh. If I’ve learned one thing from watching you and James it’s that your actions mean very little, despite what you may think. You’ve made a good faith effort as a friend to offer them both a better chance at happiness. You’re not responsible for their refusal to drink the water they’ve been led to. And I think less of James for spiting you so often for it.”

“Peggy.” He begged gently. They had long disagreed on Bucky’s motives and actions. Peggy had far less patience for it than Steve.

“Don’t ‘Peggy’ me. You are a good man. You’ve shown a good deal more grace and dignity than than you’ve gotten back, and you’ve been more than fair with how much help you’ve offered. I don’t remember the future making you omnipotent or omniscient. If people won’t appreciate the chance they’ve been offered, don’t take that as a failure on your part. They’re foolishness is on their own heads.” He hugged her tight. They had had this conversation before, but it was during these worse hours when he most needed to hear it. He feared the quiet nights when there was no one there to to tell him. What would he do without her? He hated even the thought of that future. In the end, they went back to bed, where the blankets were warm, the pillows soft, and Peggy’s presence settled the fretting in his heart.

Tony came by over the weekend. That in itself was a minor miracle. Tony did not go to other people. People went to Tony. If they were lucky, he sometimes deigned to notice them for longer than a one-liner. He hadn’t even called ahead, or had JARVIS call, but there he was, parking a purring Maserati next to Steve’s Buick. Steve, having been evicted from the house while Peggy watched her soaps, put down his sketchpad, and stood up.

“Hey, Uncle Steve. Nice, uh, porch.” Tony took off his sunglasses, and Steve quirked a smile at how out of place he looked in suburbia.

“Hello, Tony.” There was an awkward pause where Steve tried to think of something to say because the first thought that came to mind was something about how Tony looked actually sober today. Then that was the only thing he could think to say and all the effort he could have put into saying something appropriate was being spent beating back those words. “Do you want to sit down?” He finally managed, and thought that for the first words after a fight they weren’t too bad.

“Nah, can’t stay. Just dropped by, you know.” Tony had the uncomfortable look of a man who neither believed his own bullshit nor thought anyone else believed it either. “Cause I was, uh, in the neighborhood.”

“Sure.” Steve said, willing enough to go along with Tony’s nonsense for the sake of easing whatever conversation this was going to be. “I know how it is.” Steve waited for Tony to fill in the next part of the conversation, but Tony was as lost as, well, Tony Stark in suburbia. Steve decided to break the ice and took a not too massive leap of logic. “About last Wednesday, I’m sorry if I came on too strong about the documentary...” It was about as far as Steve was willing to go on accepting responsibility. This one was on Tony and they both knew it.

“No, no. I probably overreacted. Just, uh, just, you know, a bit.”

“Well, it wasn’t really the best timing, for either of us.”

“Yeah, I might have had a little too much too drink. Which, isn’t really a great excuse or anything, but, it’s, uh, kind of all I got going for me right now.” It wasn’t really an apology. Steve debated accepting it anyway, because this was how relationships with Tony worked. He stepped over the line, awkwardly did not apologize but looked sad until you forgave him, and then he toed the line until the next time something set him off. It was easy enough to justify during the good times, but Steve got to feeling pretty ill-used by Tony’s absolute minimal effort approach while in the thick of it. It must have appeared on his face because Tony backed off, shuffling his feet like a guilty schoolboy. “Actually, do you mind if I sit for a little while? I have a little time before I have to go.”

“Of course, of course” Steve gestured to the porch swing, the only real furniture they had room for, excepting a tiny little wicker table where his sketchpad sat next to a sweating glass. It was the glass that gave him an out. “Do you want anything to drink? There’s more tea in the house.”

“Oh, tea would be great thanks. I... totally drink tea, would love some, really.” Steve went inside, Peggy was sitting in the armchair. The TV was on, but she was dozing. Onscreen, some dark haired man kissed a platinum blonde in a badly lit living room. Steve rolled his eyes a little. He loved Peggy, but her taste in television was just awful. He took his time pouring the tea, but there was only so much to do. He didn’t even have to add sweetener because the tea was southern style, and therefore already tasted like wet sugar. He usually didn’t care for it personally, but Peggy liked it and it was nice enough for sitting and sketching. He was grateful that he hadn’t gone with a beer like he’d had half a mind to. Tony was still sitting on the porch when he came back out. He sat down next to him.

“I probably should give you that explanation.” Said Tony, taking his tea.

“You don’t have to.” Not that he didn’t want or deserve an explanation, but guilting Tony into things wasn’t a habit he wanted to start.

“Yeah, but I should tell you. Because you aren’t just dad’s friend. I shouldn’t have said that or some of the… other things. Still, I’m uh, I’m gonna use this to turn over a new leaf. Stop drinking so much, that kind of thing. Like a New Year’s resolution. Except without the party. Cause that would, you know, kind of ruin the point. And, where was I going with this? I swear I was actually going somewhere with this.”

“An explanation.

“Right, yeah. So you were right. This is about dad. There was a scare, a couple years back. I guess I didn’t tell you.” Steve had no idea what Tony would classify as ‘a scare’ at this point in his life.

“What kind of scare, are you alright?”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine. It wasn’t me. There was a man... a man who came forward, claiming he was my nephew, or half nephew, I guess.” Tony rubbed his hand across his his face. “I don’t know. It didn’t hit the press, and the DNA came back negative, so it didn’t matter. But, I… It just seemed so plausible. You know. Like sure, that makes sense. And ever since I’ve been wondering if there’s...” Tony wiped his fingers absently along the side of the glass. Steve leaned back into the porch swing.

“Huh.” He had never thought about it before. In the future, which was now almost the present, Howard had one son and Tony Stark was the absolute inheritor of Howard’s legacy, in both wealth and genius. He had never considered that there could be anyone else. Of course, now that he thought about it, it sounded terrifying. As much as he loved Tony, and really he did, one was enough.

“You and Aunt Peggy have always just been so… stable? You’ve been married since, I don’t know, forever. And I thought dad was kind of the same, but now… I don’t know, I guess I never really thought of dad as… someone without mom. Which is weird. I heard all the stories and saw the photographs with the actresses and the showgirls and everything. I just didn’t think of it like... that.”

Someone, somewhere, had told Steve that there was nothing so devastating to a man as realizing that his father was human. He wouldn’t know, personally. Joseph Rogers had become a faded legend in the back of his mind. If he went back in time and met the man, it wouldn’t even matter anymore, not really. Howard Stark was another matter. He’d actually been a great big living legend, and for all that Tony had had a close up view and a cynical nature, there was always a blind spot. Of course, the irony of Tony reacting to the knowledge of Howard’s philandering by spending a couple years debauching himself was… Well. Steve had long suspected that Tony’s understanding of the word ‘hypocrisy’ might just be a little on the vague side. It was nothing new.

“Your father was lonely for a long time, before he met your mother.” He said, finally, but he knew that wasn’t really what he meant. “Howard was...” He tried again. “Howard had a difficult time after the war. He devoted a lot of himself to it, and it changed him. It changed everyone. He didn’t make weapons before the war, not really, but it was almost all he did after for a long time. Too long, maybe. I think... the war changed the way he thought, about safety, about protecting people, about losing. For most people, the world is… pretty safe. And it was hard for Howard, who knew how unsafe it was, to try and live with the rules people have for a safe world. It took him a long time, to accept that… To accept that the war was over.”

“And that makes what he did okay?”

“Okay? No. Being permanently drunk and constantly getting into flings usually isn’t really a good thing for anyone to do.” Just in case Tony hadn’t noticed the parallels.

“Yeah well, I’m never going to have kids so...” Steve was startled into a chuckle, remembering both Howard’s reaction to the thought of a son who was just like him and a little girl as yet unborn. Tony actually looked wounded.

“That’s what Howard always used to say too. Might not want to go counting any chickens just yet.”

“Oh geez, can you imagine? I’d be a terrible father. What would I even do with a kid? Do they come with a manual? Maybe like, some kind of guidebook.”

“Well, a good friend once told me that to be a father you just needed to ‘be a good role model, feed them, and teach them life lessons about sharing and being honest.’”

“Seriously? Does that work? That sounds… way too simple.”

“Well, he was kind of an idiot when it came to families, it’s true. Still, you turned out mostly all right, I guess.”

“Wait, hang on. Did you just quote my father at me? That’s what my father thought being a father was?” The incredulity in Tony’s voice was golden. “Oh my god, this explains so much. Wow, I’ve changed my mind, I could totally do better than that.” Steve laughed again.

“It’ll be alright, Tony. All of it’ll turn out all right.”


	4. Saving

2010

Steve sits down. His hands are shaking. Experience says that Tony can hold a grudge for a very long time. Also, that the actual end of the world is not enough to make him change his mind. He knows, deep down in his gut that he has just lost… something. There’s that familiar old twisting sensation of irretrievability. He hadn’t expected to have his relationship with Tony to break. Not again. Not really. He thought that he had done better this time, had given Tony what he needed through the years, and that everything else, the future, the truth, would work itself out when the time came. But he had missed his timing in the crucial moment, about six months ago, and everything since then has just been a delayed reaction. He is still the world’s foremost expert on waiting too long.

Part of the problem is that Tony is more likely to forgive him if he sees him again, but that just means Tony won’t see him again. He has an AI, a secretary, and a massive private fortune. There are very few people Tony Stark has to see if he doesn’t want to. Unless Steve is willing to resort to extremely drastic measures, he might not even get into the same room as Tony for years. He’s considering how many of those he has to spare when the phone rings. He has enough time to fumble it out of his pocket and see Bucky’s name before a high pitched whine hits him like a ton of bricks. In his distraction, he hadn’t even heard Obie come in the room.

“I really am sorry about this, Steve.” He says. “I would have preferred not having to do it like this, but well… when JARVIS told me you were here, I knew I’d have to move up my time table. You never could leave things alone.” Steve is beyond not being able to move. This feels more like his blood is being forced to a standstill and his breath has been trapped in his lungs. His muscles are locked tight into a rictus. He doesn’t know what Obie has done to him, but now he knows for sure why Tony never talked about Stane. Some things are just too unbearable to say aloud.

“It is a shame, though. I would have liked you to be able to help me ride herd on the Avengers. The nice thing about the suit is that it doesn’t matter how old you are. You can still be... so powerful. A god among men. And you want to give that to Tony. I never understood what made you think he was the right choice. Maybe in a different timeline, he could have been, but this Tony? The way he is now?” Obadiah shakes his head, and honestly looks regretful.

“You’ve spoiled him, let him go to rot. He could never be the Iron Man this world needs. Now, I may not be Tony Stark when it comes to engineering, but I’m willing to bet with a fully functioning Iron Man suit as an example, my people are going to be able to build some improvements over the years. We’ll be ready for the future when it comes. And I’ll take good care of you when we find you again. Don’t worry, we’re going to be the best of friends, buddy!” Obadiah’s smile is there and gone, not insane, just false as hell. “Now comes the hard part.” He looks at the doorway that lead down to the workshop. “Honestly, I’m not looking forward to this.” And then Obadiah walks down the stairs. Steve can hear the workshop door open in the absolute silence that follows. He waits a lifetime, unable to move.

Obadiah walks up the stairs just five minutes later. He has a small case that he holds like it’s the holy grail. He almost just goes straight for the door, but then catches sight of Steve on the couch and hesitates. He puts the case down, gently, on the table and walks back over.

“I really, really didn’t want to have to do this. It’s going to look suspicious as hell for one thing, but I’ll worry about the cover up later. For now, I’m afraid you’re about to have a stroke.” Obadiah holds up the little device he used earlier. Like all good weapons, it looks too small to do so much damage. The sound returns and intensifies far beyond where it was before, not just freezing his blood but Steve could swear reversing it. His heart aches and his head feels like it’s being crushed from the inside. His vision tunnels fast, and Obadiah is gone by the time he catches a glimpse of his surroundings again. His eyes roll lazily in his head. He can’t make them focus on anything and his concentration is shot to pieces. He can’t breathe. He can’t feel his limbs properly.

He needs to go downstairs.

Tony realizes that if he gets out of this it’s going to be a miracle. Apparently every old person he knows is out to get him. It turns out he was right about not trusting anyone over 50. Go figure. The paralysis is starting to wear off, and he can actually see the Mark 1 Reactor, hidden under a rag he tossed over it half an hour ago because it kept looking at him. It doesn’t matter though, because Obie freaking ziptied him to his workbench and even if he could scoot his way over there, he doesn’t have a free hand to save himself with. He eyes a toolbox longingly, but again. Hands. He can’t even speak enough to talk to JARVIS. Who is going to get a talking to about security. No more old people in his house. Seriously.

So he sits there, waiting to die, again, (man, this is getting old), and works up some last minute resentments, because if he’s going to die he’s going to be nice and bitter towards just about everyone. He doesn’t actually believe in ghosts, but he likes to think that when whoever comes to get his body sees his face they’ll know he died extremely pissed off, which is just about all he has left going for him. He hopes Obie’ll decide to test his heat resilience by jumping into lava, or maybe blow himself up installing the reactor. The paralysis wears off a little more as the seconds drag on, and his body starts to react by panicking. Because he’s having a heart attack and he can’t do anything except let it happen, and twitch a little.

Then he sees a shadow on the stairs, and he thinks it’s Obie come back for some reason or Pepper magically come to save him. It’s neither of them. He watches Uncle Steve half fall, half stumble down the stairs, leaning heavily against the wall. He looks like Tony feels, death warmed over, but at least he’s not tied down. Tony watches his progress with his heart racing and tripping as Steve falters on the last couple stairs and stumble slams his shoulder into the glass wall at the bottom. He leverages himself to the door like a weary tank with no turning radius, and that’s when Tony realizes, his sudden burst of hope plummeting, that Steve does not know the passcode. Steve apparently realizes this too, and his eyes meet Tony’s through the glass. Tony tries to move his lips, to mouth out the numbers, but his lips are numb and it’s all he can do to uselessly flap his jaw a few times. Steve starts to crumple into a heap, and Tony thinks it’s the end. They’re really going to die here, and Obadiah Stane is going to save the world in Tony’s place and make grandiose speeches about their tragic loss. The bastard.

Then Steve sort of pushes himself onto the far wall and leverages the weight of his whole body, throwing himself into the glass. He bounces. It’s industrial strength, maybe not bullet proof but close to, and Steve hasn’t got the weight to break it. He’s not sure it can be broken at all without a tool. Steve bounces himself a couple more times anyway, and any other time this would be hysterical, but he’s dying and Uncle Steve looks desperate. As in, he’s despairing even as he pounds his old man body into the glass, and Tony silently goes through another heart attack or three and waits for his blankly staring eyes to stop registering light as brain death inevitable occurs. Then Steve stops, and gets a look on his face. He meets Tony’s eye again. It looks like one of those not good plans. Tony has that kind of look at 3:30 AM after a bottle of whiskey, and with a week’s worth of insomnia under his belt. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

Steve stops trying to break the glass wholesale. If he was 50 years younger and had say, a large metal disc or a great big hammer, or hell, a gun, he could do it. But his body weight hasn’t caused even a tiny fracture as far as he can see. Not that it’s easy to see. The world’s been doing a lot of swimming around just recently and his left side isn’t working too well. He looks at the glass touch pad instead. He remembers complaining about electronic doors to Tony during a security redesign of their house. They were just fine until the power went out and you got locked inside your own room. There was nothing wrong with normal doors. Steve loved normal doors. They meant the future wasn’t happening yet. But Tony had insisted that it was perfectly safe; that his doors had failsafes. If the electronics developed a bug or malfunctioned, or the power went out, the door would unlock automatically. Steve had sourly pointed out that he already had doors that would open when broken. He didn’t need a fancy one that would fail during a blackout too. Tony had magnanimously installed a back up generator in the basement.

He struggles to make a fist with his right hand, which is palsied and feels weak. He doesn’t have much strength left, so he needs to make this count. He can’t cause a power outage. Even if he could get back up the stairs, which he doubts he can, Tony will have his own back up generator, probably two. He can’t think his way out of this one and clearly the force of his weight was spread out too much along his body to break the glass that way. But maybe if he focuses on just this one section, on just the touch screen and breaks it enough, the door will open automatically.

The first blow glances off uselessly, doesn’t even make the glass shake. He’s gotten too damn soft. He pushes himself into a somewhat stable position, a boxer’s stance, weight distributed as best he can with his left side dragging. Then he closes his right hand over his left, turning it into a fist. Punching is mostly about the shoulder and he won’t be able to feel what he’s doing to it anyway.

He hits it with his right, then his left.

It’s like a target box on a heavy bag.

He hits it again, not bothering to spare his hands.

And again.

He thinks his left hand might have broken, from the way the joint looks. His right is bleeding. There are smears of sweat and blood against the blue light of the screen.

And again.

One, two…

One, two…

One, two…

The glass starts to fracture, tiny crystalline cracks forming under the blue light, but the door stays stubbornly closed. Steve tries to shake his arm out a little but barely manages to jerk it. His arms and hands have locked into a ready position. Conveniently, he needs to punch things, so he guesses it’s good that that’s how they’ve frozen up. He glances at Tony again, just to make sure he’s still alive. He would be gratified by the look of disbelief on Tony’s face as he struggles weakly against the ties and stares at the crackinging glass, but he’s too relieved to see Tony moving. The paralysis must have worn off. Good. Hopefully Tony can save himself once freed, because Steve’s not sure he can do much more than that. He slams his hands into the fracturing glass again. His knuckles grate against the jagged fissures and blood drips down the glass. His skin has gotten fragile and thin after so long. Again. Again. Again. A lot of things break in his hands. It doesn’t matter. Then suddenly, his fist crashes through the glass, throwing him off balance into the wall and slashing his arm in long deep cuts. The door opens.

He pulls his hand back through the wall, not bothering to try and avoid the bloody, jagged, glass teeth of the hole. Then he pulls the door open and wedges himself into the room, using the jamb as support.

Tony watches as Steve falls into the room. Actually falls. And if he wasn’t currently having a heart attack, he would have another one. People Uncle Steve’s age shouldn’t be falling down. Never mind the paralysis and major blood loss. Seriously, that is a lot of blood. Probably not an artery because it’s not spraying or anything, but still. Even if Uncle Steve pulls a miracle off and Tony is saved, it might just be too late. He chuffs a breath out through his teeth. He still can’t speak, though gross movement is just about possible. Steve begins to crawl his way across the floor, using his right arm to drag himself towards the toolbox and leaving an agonizing smear of red on the concrete as he pulls his whole body through the blood just pooling out of his forearm. His left is flopping loosely next to him, and Tony feels that’s a bad sign for any number of reasons. The only sound is the wet sliding scrape of Steve’s crawl, and their harsh whimpering breaths.

Steve’s hand catches on the lip of the toolbox and tools scatter everywhere as he pulls the box onto its side. He paws wildly at them, his face a mask of intense concentration. Then, despite barely being able to close his clearly broken and blood slicked hand, he curls his fingers around the handle of the wire cutters, and begins inching his way to Tony. Tony does the only thing he can do, and flops himself to the side so that Steve can reach his hands easier.

They’re so numb that he doesn’t realize Steve has cut the plastic until his arms jerk forward under the strain of his shoulders. He starts to fall towards Steve, to try and do… something, anything, but then hears words in Steve’s gasps,.

“Go… go...” So, he begins his own jerking, awkward odyssey to the Mark 1. He half collapses as he reaches the bench, and his hand flails at the magazines the case is sitting on. If he can just pull them down… His hand slips and he loses the fight against gravity, dropping to the ground. The Mark 1 reactor might as well be on the moon. He can still see Uncle Steve on the floor. Is he even breathing? Is the puddle of blood growing or has it stopped, stagnating without Steve’s big dumb heart to keep forcing it on? He is going to die. He is going to die. He is going to die and Obadiah Stane is going to steal his future. Which he didn’t want anyway, but like hell does he want Obie to have it. That’s his future to hate, thank you very much… And that’s his uncle too. No one gave Obadiah permission to go murdering his uncle either. Tony’s still pissed at Steve. If he dies… It’s dad all over again. Except Tony will also be dead soon, and he isn’t sure which of them will die first or if he could bear seeing Uncle Steve die and then sit there, waiting for his own death. Not that it matters what he can bear.

Then a soft blue glow descends to his eye level. DUM-E to the rescue.

“Good boy.” he says and slams the glass into the ground.

It takes too long to recover, then more time to wrap his t-shirt around Steve’s arm, get the suit on and find a blanket to bundle Steve in for the ride out. He goes as fast he dares. Even wrapped, the wind chill has to be vicious and he has to focus really hard on not squeezing too tight with one arm while using the other as a flight stabilizer. It’s hardly the best way to carry an injured man, but it’s faster than an ambulance and Tony is pretty sure there are no internal injuries he will make worse, so suit it is. He’s also pretty sure Obadiah used the stroke setting on Steve. Which is just… Peggy’s going to kill him.

That doesn’t stop him from calling her as he flies after he hangs up with hospital, warning them that he’s incoming. She picks up on the third ring.

“Tony? Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, not really. Listen, um, don’t freak out okay? I’m taking Steve to the hospital.”

“I’m sorry?”

“He umm, kind of got attacked by Obie, who’s a traitor, by the way. Turns out his hobby is more attempted murder than golf. Who knew?”

“How bad is he? No, don’t answer that. Take him to the hospital, but also, call Barnes. He’s been paranoid about Stane since Afghanistan. He’s probably somewhere in the city. Have JARVIS send me the details on the hospital, I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

“Great, I’ll do that. You wouldn’t, uh, happen to have his number, would you?” He doesn’t actually call Barnes next. Instead he calls Pepper and Rhodey. Pepper he needs to go to the office and see if she can find out what the hell Stane is planning, and also Pepper because hearing Pepper’s voice sounds like the best idea in the whole world right now. Then Rhodey, because he’s this close to actually freaking out and Rhodey possesses supernatural levels of calm in stressful situations.

Then he calls Barnes. The conversation does not go as planned. Not that he had a plan per se. More like, there were just ways he was vaguely expecting the conversation to go and it goes none of those ways. By then he’s made it to the hospital helipad and dropped Steve off, gently, into the waiting arms of the orderlies, giving a brief description of known injuries: stroke, blood loss, and a lot of slamming into things. Eyes widen and Steve is rapidly disappeared behind a wall of white clad people and beeping machines. Tony takes a few deep breaths and resets himself, shaking off one or two nurses asking him if he needs assistance. He’s got a rogue arc reactor and a traitor to deal with.

“This is Barnes.”

“Hey, this is Tony Stark, we’ve, um, met a few times. I’m that guy who does maintenance on your arm.” Tony’s not really confident when it comes to Barnes. He sees him about a once a year, for the aforementioned maintenance. Every time, that arm comes in with damage, and Tony is a genius and he’s spent years building and using a wide array of weapons, so he has a pretty good idea what causes that kind of damage. It’s definitely not average, around the house, wear and tear. Also, Barnes barely says two words to him beyond hello and thank you most times, so he’s really not sure where he stands with the man. And, he may or may not have been a dick about it some of the time. Or several times. Possibly, like, 9 out of 12 times. Maybe.

“Is Steve with you?”

“Umm, sort of, I just dropped him off at the hospital.”

“Alive?” He sounds suddenly hoarse. Tony is a little surprised because he has never seen or heard much emotion from Barnes, ever.

“ Uh yeah, yeah. But. I don’t know how bad a shape he’s in.” 

“ Was it Stane?” Tony does a double take. As much as he can inside the suit, anyway.

“How much do you know about all this?”

“Stane’s been a suspect since Afghanistan.”

“Why? Because he was supposed to stop me from going and didn’t?” There’s a pause, and Tony realizes he’s just given away  what he and Uncle Steve were talking about.

“That’s one reason. There are a few others.”

“Yeah, okay. We can talk about it later. Right now, he has a miniature arc reactor, an extremely strong power source that he’s probably going to use to…” Tony trails off. He doesn’t actually know where Stane is going. But if he’s been dabbling in arc reactor tech and has some kind of prototype suit then he’s probably heading for…. “I think he’s going to the downtown offices of Stark Industries. Where are you right now?”

“Right outside the building. Stane went in 8 minutes ago.”

“Wait, are you following him? How did you know?”

“I didn’t, but I knew someone had betrayed us and he was the one that could hurt us worst, so it had to be him.” Which is insane troll logic if he’s ever heard it, but score one for the paranoia team. Obadiah is a traitor.

“Right okay. I’m on my way. I think he has a prototype mechanical suit. Probably with a lot of weapons attached. If you can get inside without attracting a lot of attention great, but don’t get too close.” There’s a momentary pause, and Tony thinks Barnes is already gone when he responds.

“Don’t take too long. Or I’ll finish this without you.”

“See now,” says Tony, already in the air and streaking toward the offices at full speed, “that’s the kind of attitude that gets you not invited to a second date.”

“Really? And here I thought you just couldn’t keep their attention for more than one night.” Then Barnes is gone, and Tony has to give him points for knowing how to end a conversation. He plots revenge even as he calls Pepper with an evacuation order.

When he hits the offices, he literally hits them. It’s his building and he can do what he wants. He tells JARVIS to send himself the bill as he crashes through the ceiling and straight into someone, (he assumes Obie) about to kill Barnes. He doesn’t bother to use the stabilizer, just good old-fashioned momentum and barrels straight into the other suit. It’s like getting hit by a truck, except he’s the truck. He flares the stabilizers to push himself back as Obie lashes out from the suit shaped rubble crater he made and lands next to Barnes, who’s just picking himself up. Like a slow old man.

“See, this is why I said ‘don’t get too close’. What I meant when I said that was ‘don’t get too close.’” Barnes, doesn’t bother to respond, just sort of glares at him and flexes his left arm. The plates flare and settle, they way they do when they’re resetting after high exertion. He cracks his neck a little and settles into a ready position as Stane pulls himself up. “Yeah, no.” says Tony, and tries to slam him back down.

Sadly, he’s on the wrong side of physics, being smaller and having a lot less juice in his battery. JARVIS warns him again, it’s the third time already, that he is low on power. Stane stoops, grabs him by the leg and starts slamming him into the ground and wall as Tony desperately tries to course correct himself away from blunt force trauma. Then Barnes pulls a flying leap, like no man his age should be able to do, and pile drives his left fist into Obadiah’s helmet, hitting him again and again. Obadiah stumbles, releases Tony, whose own boot thruster sends him flying out of control into the wall, and begins desperately trying to throw Barnes off. One of his flailing arms clips Barnes in the side, and he tumbles to the floor. He controls the roll and comes back looking just mildly pissed off. Tony is a lot less graceful in his recovery and he tells JARVIS to schedule landing practice. No way is the geriatric paranoid gonna look cooler than him. Obadiah looks between the two of them, and then he opens his big. Fat. Mouth.

“Tony! So glad to see you. How was the heart attack?”

“Oh it was great, you should try it.” He moves to cover Barnes a little. So far Stane hasn’t pulled out any heavy weaponry. Probably because he doesn’t want to bring the building down on them or blow the reactor, but Barnes is the squishy one in this fight, so he really needs to get with the program of staying back.

“So, was Steve still alive when you got to him? Did you even realize he was there? That stroke setting is nasty. On a man his age...”

“I’m sorry, did you say something? I’ve been getting this high pitched whine in my ears whenever I have to listen to pathetic old men. It sounds like this,” Tony brings up his hand and lets the repulsor build for a second, sacrificing surprise for firepower. In a suit that big, Obadiah’s not going to be able to dodge anyway. He can block it however, and his arms leave off whatever nasty surprise Obie was about to set off and come up in a guard that takes the sustained blast pretty readily.

“It’s not going to work Tony! I don’t know why you’re even bothering. You don’t even want to be Iron Man. No, you don’t deserve it!” Tony asks JARVIS how long he can hold the attack. The answer is not comforting.

“What was that about a stroke?” Barnes is sort of behind him, and he’s got a... Wow, that is a big rifle. Seriously, did he always have that?

“Can we talk about this later? I’m not going to be able to keep this up.”

“How much longer?” Barnes is already aiming, handling what has to be a stupidly heavy piece of equipment like it’s a paintball gun.

“Oh, you know, now.” The blast tapers off, and Barnes immediately shoots, squeezing off two rounds that slam into the eye pieces on Stane’s suit. Then he drops the rifle and starts to close, fist cocked. Tony half sees the numbers JARVIS spits out about the rifle and makes a note to look them over properly later. Whoever custom made that was a damn artist. Tony suspects his dad probably had a hand in it. The pure physical power of the bullets hitting has stunned Obie The helmet is metal, but it’s not necessarily shock or sound absorbent. Getting hit with that much force at this range must have felt like being sucker punched.

Barnes actually jumps onto the fallen suit’s chest and just starts slamming his fist into the helmet again. Tony uses Obie’s distraction to set JARVIS on finding weak points or release catches. He inches around, getting more specs while Barnes, the pleb, continues to try the brute force option. He finds the helmet catch first. Well, JARVIS finds it. Close enough.

“Hey! Conspiracy Theory, out of the way.” He manages to pop the face plate off Obie’s helmet while Barnes pauses to give him a dirty look, some people just can’t take banter. He gets a brief look at Obie, looking more focused and less concussed than he had hoped, and suddenly they’re both sent flying as Obie boosters himself upwards and shoves them off him. Even as Barnes hits the ground, he flips a knife up out of nowhere and throws, forcing Obie to protect his face. Tony takes the opening and aims low, shooting Stane’s leg out from under him, using JARVIS as a targeter, and forcing Stane to the ground. He starts to power the glove for a headshot. He has to finish this before Obie can catch his breath. There’s way too much firepower in that suit for them to keep this up without serious property damage at the very least.

“Tony, wait!” Obie throws up a pleading hand that’s as much a threat as a supplication. Suddenly, the tunnel vision of his focus disappears. It’s Obie. Who he’s known for years. Who helped raise him. Who’s been the backbone of his company and one of his closest friends and he can’t just…

He knows what death looks like now, up close and personal. And messy. And he’ll be turning Obie’s face into that... that... wet smear on a metal door. Or maybe he can, but he’s been turning into a new man recently and he doesn’t want to be the man who can shoot a friend in the face in cold blood. Someone with a heart made out of palladium and cold steel. The Iron Man. The unstoppable Iron Man. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t…. He’s panicking and he has no time. Obie tried to kill Uncle Steve. Maybe even succeeded.

He raises his hand again. If he can do this in anger, then maybe that will be enough. He can run on rage if he has to, for a while at least. Until he figures out how to live with himself. He might not be able to look Pepper in the eye ever again, but… He brings the repulsor up for a quick shot. The least he can do.

“Tony, close your eyes.” He’d forgotten about Barnes. Tony whips his head around, hand still out, but powering down. Barnes has another gun out, small caliber .38 hollow point. He sideglances at Tony, mostly focused on Obadiah, and it’s a familiar look. Tony has spent a lot of his professional life around merciless killers. He’d known from the wear patterns on the arm that Barnes was one, but there’s a difference between knowing and knowing. “Close your eyes, don’t look.” Tony doesn’t even have time to turn his head back to Obie. The gun kicks in Barnes hands, the shot echoes. His eyes widen; he starts to turn, to look, and then freezes. He hears the armor topple, a pile of scrap metal and fragile old man. Barnes turns to him, fully. “Don’t look.” he says again. That’s not going to be a problem. He doubts there’s enough money in the world to make him turn his head right now.

Tony lets himself be led out of the room and outside where first responders are rushing up, police officers closing in, guns drawn. Tony opens his helmet and raises his hands, in a theoretically non-threatening gesture, but Barnes produces a badge out of nowhere and the whole thing becomes official SHIELD business before anyone can even go in the building. Tony ends up helping the government cover up already well under way by calling Peggy while Barnes plays phone tag with some local agent and a man whose name suggests chronic anger management problems. Then he calls the hospital and gets put on hold, which is a new experience and supremely frustrating. He’s gonna remember this. Putting someone on hold must feel great. Maybe he’ll even start taking more phone calls just so he can try it. Then he calls Pepper and Rhodey and catches them up on things until the local SHIELD agent, someone bland and forgettable named Coulson, shows up to herd the little lost public servant sheep and Tony and Barnes get to leave.

Two hours, a shower, a change of clothes and no change of battery later, Tony ends up back at the hospital in a nice suit and a charming smirk. There, he sits himself next to Steve’s bed, and threatens to buy the hospital if they set the orderlies on him one more time. He’s exhausted, but he can’t fall asleep just yet, because someone has to keep an eye on Uncle Steve until Aunt Peggy gets there.

He blinks his eyes behind his sunglasses and wakes up to Barnes tapping him on the shoulder as Peggy is wheel-chaired into the room. She hates it, but now is not the time to be hobbling anywhere. Tony is expecting a glare and a dressing down, but is reminded that other people’s worlds do not revolve around him when Peggy has eyes only for her husband. Meanwhile, Barnes tugs him gently out of the room and into an empty doctor’s office for a chat.

“Right, what the hell happened?” Barnes does not look angry, but there’s sort of a potential smoldering fury in his shoulders, and Tony hopes it ends up directed elsewhere because he is too tired for this. However long his nap was, it was not enough to do him much good.

“Well, for starters it turns out Uncle Steve has been playing Svengali with my life.” There’s no reaction to that. Barnes just stares at him, waiting. “Then Stane showed up and tried to kill us both. After that, Uncle Steve nearly killed himself getting me free, and I brought him to the hospital.”

“Yeah, I kinda had figured out those parts. I want to know what happened to Steve exactly. What the hell is a ‘stroke setting?’” So then Tony has to explain, sort of. The technical details are beyond Barnes, but he thinks he passes on the gist of it. As for the rest, he tries to vaguely imply things, but Barnes hunts out the truth with the determination and skill of… well… someone who probably has a lot of practice asking people questions they don’t want to answer. By the time he gets the whole story out of him, Tony is about ready to be done talking to people for the next month. Also, now that he is more awake, he’s wondering where the hell Pepper and Rhodey are. Or Happy for that matter. As it turns out, Barnes knows the answer to most of those questions.

“Miss Potts is on her way, just finishing up dealing with SHIELD. She found some kind of evidence connecting Stane with the Ten Rings. It’s gonna make this all go a hell of a lot smoother. Hogan is downstairs with the car. I don’t know about Rhodes, try calling him.” Tony half expects Barnes to leave him to do just that, but instead Barnes looks at him a little critically. “Come on kid, I’ll buy you a drink. There’s a bar about a block over.”

In a booth at the bar, Tony exhaustedly slumps over the table with some cheap beer that probably tastes like piss, but he can’t be bothered to focus on it enough to tell. He doesn’t really want to be talking to Barnes right now, he wants sleep, and to think of something snarky to say for when Uncle Steve wakes up, which is a thing that will happen. Barnes however, seems intent on talking to him. Today is just not his day.

“So, you’re pissed at Steve.” Tony just kind of looks at him. Oh hell no.

“If this beer comes with free relationship advice then I can go drink better free beer at home. By myself.” Barnes smirks and huffs a little.

“I was just going to ask if you wanna join the club. I’ve been pissed at Steve for years.”

“There’s a club? Is there a subscription? Do I get a little free pin and a weekly newsletter?”

“Nah, but there is cheap beer,” he nods at the bottle, “and kvetching.”

“Yeah, think I’ll pass.”

“Personally,” says Barnes, who seems almost professional in his ability to ignore what people are saying to him, “I thought Steve’s plans when it came to you were stupid.” Tony squints a little behind his glasses. He’s exhausted, but still a genius so his brain only takes a quarter of the time it would take a normal person to do the math on that.

“Hang on, I thought the original plan was for me to not get kidnapped and not be Iron Man.”

“Right,” says Barnes, “He wanted to risk the fate of half the universe, trillions upon trillions of lives, banking on you either becoming Iron Man without a kick up the ass, or of him being able to do everything by himself while you sat around in your penthouse, a spoiled rich kid, pissing yourself at the end of the world.”

“Okay,” says Tony, after a moment, “you know what, I think I’m done here.” He starts to get up.

“What, because running away from your responsibilities has been working so well for you recently?”

“I’m sorry, excuse me.” Says Tony, sitting back down and meaning neither of those phrases. “Did I do something to you that I didn’t know about? Because I’m getting a lot of hostility in this moment...” Then his brain catches up to remind him of all his less than stellar interactions with Barnes over the last decade or two. Okay, so yes, maybe. But really, there’s a slight difference between being rude and upvoting a kidnapping scheme.

“Me, no. You’re just really not the man Steve’s been talking up for 60 damn years.”

“Yeah, and who is that exactly? Because I just wanted to save some people. Maybe make the world a better place. Not… die saving the universe from crazy aliens. Do you even know how insane that sounds?”

“According to Steve, Iron Man’s a stubborn, sarcastic, annoying, genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, and the greatest defender of earth the world has ever known.” Tony stares. It’s said almost by rote. Like Barnes has heard it so many times he doesn’t even have to think about it anymore. “You’re kind of missing the most important parts as far as I can tell.”

“Hang on, how often does this come up in conversation?”

“Pretty much every time you make an ass of yourself in public we get another story about how great you are, and a lecture on how you can be an ass and the savior of the universe at the same time. So, fairly often.” Tony takes a long pull from his beer. He hates it when people expect things from him. He really does, but compared to Obadiah just writing him off…

“Hang on, you were actually for me getting kidnapped and nearly murdered?”

“Yup, all for it. We almost had to sit on Steve, although what he thought his centennial ass was gonna do, I don’t know.”

“Why? Why would you be for that? Even if you wanted me to save the world. One butterfly effect on the timeline and… pffft... I could have died there.” Barnes looks pretty unconcerned.

“Let’s put it this way, kid. The things you’ve learned about yourself these last few months, about your life, about people and the world. Would you really want to trade those things, for living the ‘Tony Stark life’? ‘Cause I think the man who made that second suit and personally went to Gulmira to save as many of Doc Yinsen’s people as he could, is a man with a lot regrets about the person he was in the past.”

“Maybe I just don’t like people planning my life for me.”

“Well, you can always sit in your fancy house and watch people die out of spite, I guess. Steve would probably be pretty disappointed. He might even get angry. Maybe he’ll finally shut up about how great you are though, could be a plus.” Oh that is just, that is just not fair. Uncle Steve is really really hard to disappoint and he’s pretty sure that he’s never actually seen him get really angry. Not for anything. He prefers a ‘You’re a better man than this, I believe in you’ approach. Tony has never once in his whole life doubted that Uncle Steve thought he was a good person, except maybe that one time, but even then not really..

“That is emotional manipulation, and I do not approve.”

“Kid, that’s just the truth. You want to be respected and admired, sometimes you gotta actually put some effort into earning people’s respect and admiration. Inventing shit and being rich isn’t everything.” Tony, who may or may not have breezed through college, and whose ‘work schedule’ is more ‘I do what I want, when I want’ than anything that resembles an actual, well, schedule, makes a face. He takes a moment or five to consider his options. He doesn’t want to live his life trying to gain Uncle Steve’s approval the way he’d always been fighting for dad’s. On the other hand, he already has Uncle Steve’s approval. Has had for years. Not once in the last forty years has Uncle Steve been anything less than good to him. It’s be pretty shitty of him, he thinks, to not show a little faith in return. He swigs the last of his beer and decides.

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll be Iron Man, save the world, save half the universe, whatever, and I’ll even survive it, but you gotta stop calling me kid. I mean it, every time you call me that it makes me twitch. Seriously, I’m gonna need therapy just because of all the times you’ve called me ‘kid’ in this conversation alone.

“Alright k-,”

“Ah! Ah! Ah!”

“Sorry. What should I call you then?”

“Well, if we’re going to be in the same club and all, call me Tony.

“I can do that.” There’s a moment of companionable silence where Barnes finishes his beer and Tony starts to doze off. “You know there isn’t actually a club, right?”

“Of course there is, you buy the cheap beer, I’ll make the little pins, we can meet monthly for kvetching. It’s a great club.”

“Whatever you say, k-Tony, whatever you say.”

Three Weeks Later

“C’mon Uncle Steve. You’ve got this. One more set.” Steve struggles through one last rep; his balance has gone completely to shit since the stroke. He sits down heavily and takes the water bottle Tony hands him. He still heals fast, faster probably than even a young man with similar injuries would heal and certainly more completely. No matter how Steve sometimes feels about his theorized lifespan, he can never deny that Doctor Erskine gave him an amazing gift.

“This used to be a lot easier, you know.” He says. Peggy, sitting comfortably nearby and playing a sudoku, looks up.

“I don’t see how that can be. You complain about it just as much every time.”

“Remember Berlin? You limped around looking pathetic for weeks.” Bucky throws his two cents in, and Steve glowers a little.

“Which time in Berlin?” Asks Peggy.

“All of them,” Bucky smirks, clearly pleased that someone gave him the set up for his punchline. Pepper takes that moment to come in with marching orders for Tony and refreshments for everyone else. The rehabilitation recovery center that Tony has turned his New York penthouse living room into for Steve’s sake has some pretty tight scheduling because Tony has promised Pepper to be better at doing his share for the company as far as actually working to a timeframe goes. Currently, that means that right now he has to juggle Steve’s rehab, Agent Coulson and SHIELD, and show reasonable progress on the arc reactor clean energy movement he’s started. Also, there’s Iron Man.

Steve isn’t quite sure how he’s doing all of it, and there’s definitely some signs of wear that make Steve feel guilty about taking up his time, but Tony, in full-on ‘money literally has no meaning to me’ mode, won’t hear of letting Steve do his own rehab, or use a different facility, or stay in his own house, so he has completely remodeled the penthouse just for them. Steve kind of suspects that Tony’s aiming to just have them move in permanently. Honestly, considering Peggy’s health, which Steve watches with an increasingly careful eye, it might just be for the best.

Also, Bucky is there because somehow Bucky, Tony, and Rhodes seem to be getting on like a house on fire. While Steve is happy about this, he’s also confused and starting to get a little paranoid. There are even inside jokes he doesn’t know about, like the little star shaped pins with frowny faces on them that they’ve all taken to wearing.

That aside, he looks around and can’t help but bask in the goodwill and companionship of the people around him and think of all the others that will someday, hopefully become a part of it. For once, he actually feels some plain old optimism for the future, even for the parts of it that include him. It’s not going to be so bad this time around. There’ll be a family waiting for him when he wakes up. There will be a new future, with different mistakes and different problems of course, but he knows with a certainty that has become ever rarer as he’s gotten older, that they’ll be strong enough handle it. All of them, together. After all,

They are the Avengers.


End file.
